Smelting Iron at Tunnel Mill
Revised: May 4, 2018
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Over the last 20 years or so, there have been many events held at Tunnel Mill where the production of iron was the focus.
-Such as melting cast iron and teaching sand casting techniques.
-Using taconite pellets in a smelter to attempt to make high carbon steel, emulating the ancient Tamahagane process.
A Short Video of one of the taconite runs
-Preparing Wootz steel
-And more recently, attempting to produce low carbon "Wrought Iron" from native iron ore.
2013: We failed to get a bloom. We had made at least two important mistakes that caused that failure. Too bad, since we did a good job of re-using the
furnace from 2012.
2013 Smelt Notes
2014: No smelt due to a poor weather report and lack of a large enough crew. But we did prepare and roast ore for the following year.
We also built a new furnace form which we would use in the next smelt.