 A few weeks ago I spent a week in Utah doing a few collaborations and had an opportunity to collect a resource I've been wanting to get for some time. All it took was a mere 14 mile hike up a mountain just to collect a very precious orange dirt. But this dirt was an important historical key to unlocking the industrial age as this dirt can be turned into metal. So let's see if I'm able to collect some of this soil, take it home and turn it into steel. In my quest to make everything from scratch, metals have always been a challenge. Most abundant sources have been fully tapped or are currently owned and restricted from accessing, so for more sources I've been limited to mostly low grade options like leftover tailings, being given a small sample from a now closed mine, low grade ore that wasn't mined, to even scavenging the concentrated ore pellets that had fallen off of trains. So a natural high grade source of iron ore has always been of interest to me. Bog ore is a type of iron ore that forms by natural biological processes that happen in bogs, allowing concentrated chunks of iron oxide to form in the right conditions. Historically humans have been using this as a source of iron for smelting since pre-Roman times and most iron from the Viking era was made from bog ore. Bog ore can potentially form in any bog, but it requires the right combination of a few factors to occur, so tracking down one in the wild could be a bit of a challenge. Fortunately the YouTube channel Good and Basic were able to locate one in Utah and offered to take me back to it. Be sure to check out their original video where they first discovered it. But first, today's video is possible thanks to today's sponsor, Upstart. Your debt can be exhausting and hold you back from many things in life. High interest loans are especially painful as you can just watch your debt go up every month with no escape in sight. 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Don't forget to use our URL and let them know we sent you. All it should have been was a drive up the mountains and then a short hike to the location but things then ran into a little bit of an issue. On our way to get some bog order we ran into a little bit of a problem as the road is closed still. I zoomed for winter a little early in the season I guess so we're on our own to go by foot. This is about seven or eight miles so this will probably take a good part of the day but hopefully we can still succeed and get our iron. We're in trail moment. We're gonna forge it's been about three hours about a half mile from the actual location. Just got touched through the snow, I'm sorry about the snow shoes. Almost there. All right so it took about four hours. We ended up the trail hiking on foot. Very exhausting. It was a little over seven miles very treacherous towards the end. Lots of snow got pretty deep at some points and lots of kind of roulette of what when you're just gonna fall in up to your waist. Snow shoes would have been nice. Didn't expect that. Look what the trip I was expecting for this. We made it to the bog but now unfortunately it's covered in snow. It's gonna be a little bit hard to find the actual bog ore because it's can't really look for the red soil when it's covered in snow so hopefully we got lucky. Hopefully Joseph's memory of where was that before works out and we can track down some and get out of here before it gets dark and cold and miserable. Let's start digging and hopefully find something. I do like it when things work. Doesn't that look like a pile of rust? Yeah. That's rust. This is an organic form of iron ore. It's high grade which means it's easy to smell with primitive means. So no wonder this was the stuff to fuel the iron age. You know it's not gold but every single time we find ore like this I can't help but feel like we've struck it rich. Oh it'd not be good. Right now it's making lumps and I suspect that's because it's frozen. It's a bag of rust but it's fancy rust. It's organic. No really it's it's organic iron ore. This is easy to find high grade stuff so if you're gonna do it primitive bog ore is the way to go. This place is amazing. Okay now that bag goes in another bag. It might sound a little bit random to be looking for iron ore in a bog but the way it works is actually extremely cool. There are certain types of bacteria that can actually consume dissolved iron oxidize it into iron oxide and there's a little bit of energy stored in the iron when they do that which means they're actually eating metal. They eat dissolved metal. They turn it into rust but as soon as it's been eaten and turned into iron oxide it precipitates out of solution and it won't dissolve anymore. This stuff builds up. You get water trickling into a bog. You get acidic conditions which are just right for this type of bacteria and then you get the iron building up and a second iron bacteria finds this iron oxide toxic and so they will aggregate it together into lumps kind of like coral. So if you run around an old Irish bog and stab into the dirt if you feel a lump it's very likely to be iron ore. Look how staining that is. Snook one. This one's staking kidney pie. That's amazing. Thank you Boggler. It's been a lovely trip. Then just the same seven mile hike back to the car. This time carrying the heavy load of ore. Meanwhile while I was out gathering ore in Utah Joe one of the blacksmith and brewmasters we've collaborated with in a few videos was preparing to do a smelt and was busy building everything he needed for that with some of his friends. We are going to be building the smelter stack today. It is bricks and clay which provides a stable base for the rest of the smelter stack to sit on top of. As we're making it we want to need it and then form it into about softball sized balls. I've always wondered about life as a dung beetle and I'm trying to feel it. You live in your dung beetle life. I like it. All right we're just going to start layering clay up against our form. We have about half of our smelter constructed. It's now wrapped up to make sure all of our clay stays nice and wet so we can continue building up tomorrow. This is the end of day one. Now we are forming a clay twir which will be the air inlet for the smelter. This should hopefully be a more durable internal structure inside of the smelter that'll survive the entire smelt and keep the hot spot in the smelter right in the center where we want it in that reducing atmosphere. It's looking like all the ones I've seen on the internet. Nothing non-phallic about it. We are going to drill the hole in the side of the furnace that will be mounting our twir in that provides air flow into the charcoal burning inside. We're going to drill it sort of at a 20-ish degree angle. We want the twir to kind of create a hot spot in the center of the furnace but not be too steep. Otherwise it can actually interfere with bloomery formation and potentially even split the bloom in half of the smelter. This bloomery furnace ready to go. The twir is installed. The door has been tweaked and everything's ready. So now we are just going to light a nice gentle fire inside of it to kind of cure up the rest of the clay in the internal shaft. Solidify the twir and then tomorrow morning we're ready to light it up to actually start putting ore charges in. Back from Utah after a really grueling hike in the mountains I was able to get a decent supply of bog ore. A lot of vikings used for smelting iron. I'm here with Joe who's been working on recreating a viking style bloomery. Here you go. Thank you very much. So we'll roast this up and use this as some of our charges today. We'll burn off the water and we should see a bit of a color change as the oxides present themselves as much more red after it's roasted. I built a sort of Viking Age short stack bloomery furnace that should take about six hours total and hopefully at the end of it we'll pull a nice lump of iron. We'll do everything right and we're lucky. We're creating a like four inch high layer of charcoal finds or charcoal powder below the twir and this will give kind of a nice pre-filled area for the bloom to start consolidating on and forming that nice liquid bed of slag. Once it's got a nice solid heat going we'll start adding two kilogram charges of ore and charcoal at a time. Hopefully six hours later we'll be able to pull out a consolidated bloom chunk that will then forge into something. And how much ore are you planning to put in and how much do you expect to get out? Today I think we're going to charge about 55 pounds of ore total but if we pull 15 I'll be very happy. I need to take a little out which is where we want to be. So much ash. I can't even see down there now. If we can all gather around please to a productive efficient smooth running smelt. We shall offer some sage for the friend's wedding. Some very nice island scotch and a sampling of the abalore that we used last time. The Wendy's bag really sells it. A clanking method. You're not afraid of arm hair? If I have arm hair at the end of this I've done something wrong. Imagine doing this all day. That's what a princess is like. Can you imagine? This is how you're going to make every bit because I'm a fan of it. I'm not a fan. I know you're sticky. Oh my gosh. There we go. How does it taste? Bile mean? How it's flying. So yeah a little bit. We're going to open this back up and try to get a little bit more slag out. We're getting a little full inside. There we go. So right now we're seeing nice like liquid silica. I'm looking to not, I don't see any sparks which is good. It means there's not a lot of iron coming out in it. In fact now we are going to call that done for a little bit. The hot spot is where we want it to be this time. This is a much better slag composition. That's really good. Again we learned a couple things. So that was our third successful slag tap. As the slag builds up in the furnace it'll start to block the airflow from the twir. So we're essentially removing it to provide more room for more slag to fill it. The slag is mostly silica other elements from the smelter stack itself as well as there should be a small amount of iron in there which is actually a good thing. It means we're reducing it properly. So in there there should be like little beads of iron and eventually we can actually run this back through the furnace and re-extract that reduced iron. This is our final charge. This will be our 34th kilogram of ore. And then we will let all of this burn down, open up the front door and then try to extract our bloom. It just, it just happened. I mean I'm a beast. The bricks are sacrificial. So right now we have opened up the door birthing chamber, what you will. We're letting it free tap and in a few moments we're going to start digging around to see if we can't find a bloom. We're at the moment of truth. I'm very excited. And then I get to sit down. It's going to be great. I haven't sat down since we got here. Okay to all who wants to watch this whatever the f*** is going to happen next, we're doing it. Conveniently, I think the bloom has migrated towards that opening. Perfect. Yep, that's it. This will be right where you're standing to take a step back. Yes, all right we've got two chunks. Let's get some tea. Get perfect. Definitely some good mass there. I'm going to play with it. That I'm not feeling like I'm going to be lit on fire. All of these are going to be pieces of iron. So right here is probably our single most consolidated chunk of bloom. If I'm going to hazard, I guess. Hazard. Probably maybe 10 pounds. Not bad. It's too high carbon, bad for blade steel. It's an absolute bear to consolidate. So I may actually decarbarize this a bit. How do you do that? You can bake it. That's very high carbon. I wasn't what I was shooting for, but it works. So we did not make iron. We made steel. It'll be a lot harder to turn into a workable material afterwards. But it'll be a fun challenge, I think. So honestly, successful. So at the end we are able to produce a pretty large supply of steel or this orange dirt. Thanks again to Good and Basic for sharing with me the location of this boggler and for being willing to go on this really long hike with me. And thank you to Joe for his expertise in turning this dirt into steel. We're going to continue working with this piece of steel with Joe, fully working it into something a little bit more usable, which will likely involve turning it into iron and then potentially back into steel. I think it'll be a good opportunity to do a bit of a deep dive where we explore the differences of some of the alloys of iron with steel and to kind of explore reliable ways of turning one into the other. So we can comfortably say we've moved on into the age of steel. So be sure to subscribe for that. Thank you again to all of our supporters on Patreon. Thanks for watching. And one last thing, catch me at VidCon where I'll be next week. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. Also, if you've enjoyed this series, consider supporting us on Patreon. We are largely a fan-funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going. Thanks for watching.