Ireland…Back in the bog! 2019.

A year on and I have returned to the furnace festival in Ireland with my own artistic food furnace aka mad dog to try and smelt and cook some meals using the residual heat.

Our first mission was the bog and digging up some ore. The site was incredible and a lot of ore was just on the surface. I believe the are we went for had had the peat cut of the to and when they got to the ore later they just move on. This made our job a lot easier.

Aside from the ore on the top I did manage to dig down a foot or so and find a good seam. Here the ore was unoxidised and had a purplish sheen to it . You could see the Crystalline structure clearly.

The finished pieces. 19/11/18

And so after months of work and learning I have arrived at this point . There is still a lot to do as the final sculptures are made using these blades , meaning they must still be processed further to reach my desired goal . My aim is not to be a blade maker but to use the iron I smelt in my art work.

The journey has been so a lot of fun and a lot of hard work !! I’ve learnt an incredible amount. A HUGE THANKS TO THE WCMT!!!!

I’m now on a train to Osaka writing a proposal to start now developing the skills I have gained drawing from both my Irish and Japanese experiences. I’m looking forwards to building my first furnace alone!!!

Heat treatments. 17/11/18.

The surfaces of the finished pieces are now acceptable… the thing is every time I think they are ok I go to bed and come back in he morning and see more little imperfections I want to change. The idea of perfection seems an impossible goal. Perhaps though this is the key to continued learning and development, and by striving to be better each Time my skills and work will continue to improve.

I have also been developing three other knives using modern steel ( bought steel not smelted from iron sand ) which may be used in a different art project I won’t go in to now.

The colour of the metal is important in this process so all the lights are turned off in the workshop. Nobuya brought one blade up to a dull red and showed me with a magnet that at this colour it was still magnetic. With a little more heat , a orange the metal became non magnetic and it is this colour I had to remember and reach each time.

The blade was constantly moved above the fire forwards and backwards and each side to get an even heat and colour along the cutting edge.

Once this was reached it was quickly quenched. To much time taken to reach the water and it cools and the process won’t work. The blade enters the water horizontally and then is turned on its side whilst moving through the water . This way you can see the bubbles formed coming off he surface and when they are about to end and are white the blade is quickly pulled out. The aim is that this shows when the temperature of the steel is at about 200 degrees.

The knife was then quickly tested by putting one drop of water on it. If it balls on the surface it is submerged verrrry briefly again he left to cool.

Once cool the steel is very brittle and now must be normalised to remove this. To do this it is dipped in water and “bbq’d” ( held above the flames, low and slow) . You can see the water evaporating with the heat and the surface drying so you now know it’s 100 degrees. We continued to heat it but holding it up from the flames and testing by regularly putting a drip of water on it. When a ball skates on the surface it has reached 200 degrees and it is left to cool down naturally. The edges can now be sharpened and the cutting edge made using grinding and various stones .

Surfaces. 16/11/18

Once the final shapes had been forged I quickly realised I am still far from finished and time suddenly seems like it’s going way to fast! Many long hours and late nights followed.

For this first body of work using hand made iron I decided to make use of Nobuya expertise in knife making. It also seems like a important part of Japanese culture, something respected and renowned world wide. With in my work I am interested in using traditional techniques or practices and using them in a contemporary way , so focusing on knife making whilst here also seems to fit in with this ideology.

Nobuya’s Blacksmithing workshop solely produces knives using traditional methods. I have done very little knife making before so there was a lot to take in.

What I found most testing was the precision of the work needed especially with the sanding and polishing. There is a belt grinder to remove the bulk of material but everything else is done by hand using oil stones, stones and sand paper.

Two of my designs had a textured finish and one remains with the black scale on the outside. This is very traditional in Japanese knives. On these three only the cutting blade area needed polishing and sharpening.

The other two required a lot of patience. One I wanted to experiment with etching the surface and the other I wanted to show the beauty of polished metal. This way I have five very different surfaces for the five small garden sculptures.

First the bulk of the outside scale was removed using the belt grinder. Several grades were used up to 240 grit and then the rest is done by hand. The next photo shows the surface texture this gives, and also captures a moment of reflection I had… last week this steel was sand on a beach! Incredible!

I used some natural stones of you use with water and oil stones. Oil stones are small man made pieces of stone which you dip in oil and work the surface with. The idea is to work through the grits making sure at each stage you get the surface a uniform texture , with no visible marks or scratched different to the ones being made. The same goes with the wet sandpaper. I worked through grits till 10,000!

Developing the final piece and working on surface texture. 13/11/18

Over the last few days I have been finalising the shapes of my five knives which will be the central features to the small Japanese garden inspired sculptures I am making.

We are forging the shapes for the knives , not grinding them out of the tamahagne bar. This is important to the look and feel of the knife I think. I want to use as many traditional methods as possible in the forming of this work. Only the edges are straightened on a belt sander . Nobuya has been teaching me how important angles are when using these machines and also the care and skill needed is much higher than just holding down the steel and hoping for the best!

I’ve been learning a lot about the precision involved in knife making which has been challenging and frustrating at times but something I am enjoying. It’s good to feel humble sometimes especially when working alongside skilled craftspeople. I love that there is a lot to learn in my journey but have to remember patience!

The hand made steel is a wonderful material. It’s very hard and also more stable, it seems to hold up to heating a-Lot better than Commercial steel. There may also be irregularities and imperfections with in it and you need to plan enough material for these. These are especially around the ends or edges.

It has been a very tight squeeze getting five knives out of the bar we pattern welded and in the future I will allow a bit more room so there is a bit less pressure. However with such a valuable material I think it a very important not to waste it and respect the hours of work gone on to making it!

I want each knife to be different so have been using or making different tools to make textures on some of the surfaces.

Other things I have been working on are designing the smaller parts to the sculpture which also need careful consideration . These include the little rakes included with each garden to draw patterns into the iron sand .

It thought a lot about how to make these. The interesting situation is how much different advice you can get when making if you ask . I am learning to listen to this and consider it all before making rash rushed decisions. I also must remember my own artistic training though and not be put off by challenges to get what I want visually. I also realised I’m stubborn!

I really wanted these to be precise and perfect, not hand made looking, and decided to have them laser cut due to the fine detail.

It is also common practice for a knife to have an engraved message or name on the side of it. I have also been learning to engrave and researching suitable Japanese proverbs which relate to steel or knifes / swords in some way to put on each.

Starting to form the final shapes. 12/11/18

After a lot of re folding and fire welding I have got two pieces of useable steel bar from the smelted Iron sand bloom. One is 1.1kg and the other 1.3kg (There are also a few large pieces of bloom left from my smelt which I will consolidate if I have some time let at the end .)

The amount of effort and work that it has taken to reach this point is incredible and I feel very protective of these bars. There’s NO room for error now… talk about pressure.

My plan is to make five small sculptures using these two steel bars. These are described in an earlier post, but described briefly again will each feature a knife traditionally hand made.

Each knife will then be Cut up and displayed as part of a mini Karesansuei ( literally meaning dry mountain water) . These are Buddhist rock and gravel gardens which are raked as a meditative and concentration improving technique, often by monks.

I first sketched out my designs and worked out which knife I needed to get out of what of the two pieces of steel. I had to make sure this was marked out correctly as each is a different length and width when finished so will use a different about of steel.

As the steel is so precious I have to be careful not to use too many heats when drawing it out as this wastes material. Equally important Is cutting the bar at an Angle between knife blanks so that this cut part is forged into the points. Using a hot set and then shaping it with heat rather than a grinder gives it a nicer pattern and also saves material.

The first job was to stretch out the bar using the power hammer till it was long enough that I could handle it with out tongs. I then marked on what needed to be used for each knife and made small centre dots so I would know where to work up to on each , and where to eventually cut.

Callipers were set up next to the power hammer so that I like easily check the different sections were the correct width.

Once we came across a small part in the steel which had not fire welded together correctly and had Created an air pocket. This was first punctured with a chisel and then got very hot , flux added and it fire welded together

It took a bit of time to get used to the sensitivity of a new power hammer but it was good fun. It is important to not make the bar to thin where. Drawing out or it cannot be easily pushed back. The key is to always think one step ahead and keep it at chunky as possible . The last blows on the power hammer should be used to thin it and this is what ones the excess within and length needed.

The pieces were cut in to sections using a hot set once the correct size had been reached and then the long edges straitened and flattened by hand on the anvil. Instead of using a wire brush to clean it water was put on the anvil face and the steel held at an angle above it. By hitting down the heated water explodes and blows scale off the surface , thus cleaning it. It was then got to a cherry red and left to normalise in a bucket of ash overnight . Normalising allows it to cool down slowly so that it is softer for further cold surface texturing work in this case.

Consolidating the blooms and Pattern welding of the steel. 10/11/18

The process of smelting has left us with very irregular shaped pieces of steel. Trapped with in this are multiple impurity’s, pieces of charcoal and air spaces. It is currently totally unusable. The past few days have been spent forging and fire welding together these chunks of bloom in to workable bars. This stage is really exciting for me as it marks a big step towards my end goal which is to use this hand made iron in my sculptures.

The first process is to get the bloom hot equally to the core. As it is not dense at this point it must be brought up to temperature slowly as it is easy to burn away the small outside pieces. We are forging using charcoal on a bottom blast forge. The Japanese style forge is lower than ground level, so you are working in a pit, and the anvil is set at height for the person working down there. This made striking quite an interesting experience for me to adapt to (especially as im quite tall) as it meant the anvil face is very low for anyone not working in the pit.

Our aim was to first tap in the extremities of the bloom slowly to make in more consolidated using a sledge hammer , very lightly at first! The next two photos show how it was when retrieved from the smelting furnace , and how it looks after a light forging.

We need to flatten the pieces and then stack them up and join them together by fire welding. The resulting piece ( made up of the two smaller bits) is then folded multiple times to draw out the impurity’s and make a more uniform material.

Other materials to prepare before the forging starts is the burning of rice straw to black ash pieces and the mixing up of a clay slip. These are kept near the forge and the bloom dipped in the ash first and then the slip just before fire welding. The ash acts as a natural flux and the clay slip protects the outside from loosing carbon.

The process is hot, hard work and also very time consuming. It made me really realise how much work is needed to make my own iron. It suddenly becomes a very expensive material!

The first few fire welds are more difficult as the bloom wants to break up. The clay and straw also help to hold it together in the fire whilst getting it up to temperature . We are looking for the surface to become glassy, a bright white colour and sparks seen in the flames.

Once it was holding together we could start using the power hammer and weld on a handle instead of handling it with tongs.

The power hammer was so useful and I am defiantly investing in one as soon As my workshop opens next year. Once the initial two pieces of bloom were fire welded together we used the power hammer to draw out the steel in to a bar shape. You can tell the weld has taken when the whole lump heats up together and there are no colour variations.

As there was slag trapped in the bloom and we are also dipping it in clay to fire weld, a lot of slag built up in the bottom of the forge . As it is a bottom blast forge this must be regularly cleaned or the air flow becomes blocked and the correct temperatures cannot be reached.

Once drawn out the bar was then cut almost in half at the middle point using a chisel, and then folded along this weak point.

Once it is folded in two it is dipped in ash and clay , fire welded together and then drawn out and split as just described . The whole process is repeated at least six times. This builds up the multiple layers in pattern welding, removes all the impurity’s and creates an nice forgeable bar!

It is an incredible amount of work to get to this point before anything creative can be done with it! I’m totally in love with the process though and can’t wait to develop work with the steel.

Oroshigane. 8/11/18

The hoist was used to lift up the lower sections 1 and 2 which were now cool but fused together. With a bit of persuasion they separated and the bloom remained in section 1. Using a hammer and chisel it was carefully removed. There was a lot of slag and glassification which had caused it to stick to the clay walls.

We carefully removed the main bloom, trying to preserve as much of the furnaces clay lining as possible. We bucketed up any material not attached to it.

We spark tested the main piece using a grinder and bright sparks were seen indicating a steel had been made, perfect for knife making.

The next stage is what was really fascinating. All the material that came out of the furnace along with the main bloom was then taken to a motored crushing hammer a loaded in bit by bit to the dish.

It was slowly crushed into around 5 mm cubed pieces. These were then passed through a number of sieves. Any larger pieces were re-crushed, any fine dust material sieved out and the rest tested with a magnet. All the small magnetic iron particles which had been made but not attached to the main bloom were sorted out and collected by this method.

This is what I love about Japan, everything is considered and saved in an efficient manner. We actually found just over 2kg small pieces! The main bloom was broken in to large forgeable chunks and any smaller and medium size pieces would be rejoined through the process of oroshigane. In total there was 8.2kg of iron collected.

The process of oroshigane is used to stick together all the small pieces which are unusable and un forgeable as tiny fragments. A much smaller secondary furnace is used to do this which is clay lined and has one air pipe in.

A carbon charcoal bed was made in the lower section and the two pieces stacked on top of each other. A fire was lit inside the furnace and the air turned on. As it was much smaller and already dry not so much pre heating was needed and charcoal was used strait away. The carbon bed was dampened and compressed after the fire had been burning for a bit and then built up again. We wanted a solid carbon bed which came up just above the seam line between the two furnace sections.

After about 30 minutes of pre heating 200g of small iron particles and a scoop of charcoal were added every 2 minutes till 2.4 kg in total was used. The pieces were added to the top of the furnace in the centre but slightly towards the air pipe, which is the hottest point. They were small at first, larger in the middle and small at the end again. You could see sparks like when Fire welding indicating they were fusing and the internal colour of the fire was bright yellow/ white.

The two sections of the furnace were then split and amazingly all the small pieces had formed a bloom! This was lightly compressed with a sledge hammer on the anvil. The whole process repeated again for another 2.4 kg of small particles. What an incredible process to save tiny pieces and make them useable!

Smelting day. 7/11/18

Today we were up early to start the smelt ! The First job was to join the upper two sections to the two parts already assembled. We made a clay putty to go between layers 2 and 3 and then a clay snake to seal the top layer on ( so round the join of 3 and 4).

We then lit a wood fire in the furnace , it is essential to pre heat the furnace. This also drives out any remaining moisture. All 6 air holes ( three in part 1 and three in part 2) are left open to assist the draw of air through the furnace and help it reach higher temperatures. This wood fire was kept burning for 2.5 hours.

In the meantime there were many other jobs to do to prepare for the smelt. The iron sand was mixed with 500g of sieved ash and 2kg of sieved clay powder . This was made damp with water so that when you squeeze it with your hand you can see finger marks. This mix is important to help the slag flow. It also binds with the sand adding some weight to it so it doesn’t rise up and out of the furnace when added, with the thermal movement.

The mix was then weighed into 1kg portions which would be added one at a time to the furnace Along with 1kg of charcoal .

After 2.5 hours the furnace was packed full of wood for a further half hour and then the ash bed was compressed in the bottom of the furnace With a long pole.

Then the lower three holes were attached to a air feed system using clay. The clay makes a tight seal and also protects the steel pipe the air enters through from melting. The three flaps in part 2 are also now closed.

After three hours of preheating with wood we filled the furnace to the brim with charcoal (this took 12 kg) and turned on the lower air source which entered from three points .

Charcoal was then added for a further hour. The pre heating process is very important, we were adding 1kg every 4-6 mins on average.

After this hour pre heating with charcoal the upper air source was also turned on ( about 20% but this will vary from blower to blower. The air flow is very important too much and it will all makes slag and too little and the temperatures can’t be reached for the reaction to happen) .

We now started to add 1kg of iron sand and 1kg or charcoal. The aim was to add this every 4 minutes. As with in Ireland you watch the top of the furnace to see when enough space has been made by the charcoal combusting and so the level at the top dropping enough for the next load to be added. If this is faster or slower than 4 minutes the air source was adjusted accordingly.

At the start the flame is meant to look like sun rise, there is a reddish blue tinge and towards the end like sunset and it turns more orange.

Form now on in it was a lot of work. Not only must iron sand and charcoal be added the air feed holes in part 2 had to be checked to make sure slag hadn’t blocked then. Drips were moved to the side with a steel poker but this has to be done quickly or the heat would escape.

Other things to observe are the shape and colour of the flame. I should be large and bright. You must also listen to hear if any vents are blocked.

The air source to the bottom should be stopped at about the 10th load of iron sand and the holes plugged with clay. After this the flaps in section 2 must repeatedly be checked and cleared from slag drips as this is the only air source.

The top air source should now be turned up so that the pattern of adding sand and charcoal roughly every 4 minutes it retained. It is important to also see if you can see slag pooling up to the level of these holes. If you can it is very important to now tap if off via the lower holes!

We tapped the furnace multiple times . I was very surprised at how much came out! The amazing thing about this design is that I was able to catch the slag in moulds and so try out my casting idea! And I worked! I was very happy with these results.

This process of adding sand and charcoal was repeated 27 times ( we used about 22 kg of iron sand plus the other materials and water added made it up to about 27kg)

Once all the sand mix had been added we continued to tap regularly . A further 2kg of charcoal was added after this and it was left to burn down with the air feed still attached and on until charcoal level burnt down to near the top of part 2.

The top two sections are taken off at this point and the whole furnace left overnight to continue to burn down and cool down.

Preparing for the smelt. 6/11/18

The first job of the day… my favourite.. charcoal chopping! At least it was a nice weather and we had music and The beautiful autumn scenery.

The pieces were cut about 4cm square and we did some bags smaller (2-3cm) for a secondary process (which I can’t yet get my head round remembering the name of yet as it’s a very hard Japanese word. I will though!)

This hard-to-remember-the-name-of technique uses a smaller secondary furnace which needs smaller charcoal. It’s aim is to get all the tiny pieces of steel formed which don’t attach to the main bloom in the process to combine together into a useable bloom. I like this idea , it is very Japanese, I’m always impressed at how well everything is used and how nothing is wasted here.

The furnace we are running was designed by Nobuya’s master and is a really incredible machine. I have taken the measurements and will rebuild this as part of my research… with a few adaptations discussed over dinner last night. I want to make a furnace which is also a functional kitchen so you can cook and heat water on it and not waste energy, but also make it a more sociable space.

The furnace is steel with a clay lining and this one has been used for over 10 years. The design means that only a small area of the clay sand mix used as the lining is replaced each time which saves a lot of time and work building the furnace each time or having to dry thick clay walls . It also makes it some what portable another key interest of mine. The part where the clay must be replaced is the lowers area where the bloom forms and the walls are broken down in the reductive process.

Nobuya uses a clay mix he buys which it’s original use is to start the germination of rice seeds . Small plants are grown in this material then transferred to the paddy field. I’m probably unlikely to get this in England! But it is essentially a clay sand mix just like I’ve seen in other places. We mixed it with water using our feet to a firm consistency an made balls.

These were then firmly thrown against the steel wall where it has fallen away in the previous smelt. Below you can see the where this has happened and needs replacing. It’s only about 5cm thick, the rest of the clay lining is heavily glassified and remains in place.

Wetting the area between the old and new clay helps it stuck together. Then it is built up to the top of the steel section. Slightly more clay is put around the air holes as this is the hottest part and where it degrades the most. This clay bulge is slightly fanned out to help spread the air and also slightly angled down to encourage the air to go to the lower areas of the furnace.

A special wooden tool helped keep the shape of the hole whilst packing the clay, and was also used to pay and smooth the insides.

The middle section was then flipped and using a hoist it was lifted on to the lower section (shown in the next image) which also had had part of the wall rebuilt. We then built a small fire to dry out the new clay lining. This hardly took any time to dry!

It allowed much more time to sit and enjoy the fire and make some notes before a delicious dinner.