Only a day after Zaka left and we're at atempt at smelting the copper. I've brought a bucket of water to drop sg into as well, since I'm hoping to scoop that out of the crucible if I . I've actually got two crucibles to work with this time. Oo put into the tray above to cool, and ao attempt to pour into the small ingot cast. I load the first crucible into the furnace, and then put the ingot cast in beside it. After both get up to a healthy yellow glow, I remove a bit of sg from the inside of the crucible with the stone dle, and drop it into the bucket. , I move the crucible up onto the upper shelf, which itself almost looks like it is faintly glowing. I get the sed crucible loaded up, and moved into the furnace, and wait for it to get up to a glow as well. While it's going, I end up having to shovel in some new charcoal into the furnace, which I hope doesn't ihe copper to badly, but if it does, this is all a test anyway.

  After a while, the temperature of the new crucible rises to a hot enough level, and I try to scoop as much of the sg out as I . es the hard part though, which is p the copper into the ingot mold. I've made a small lip on one side of the crucible for p, but even with that, maneuvering a heavy crucible on the end of stoongs near sweltering temperatures isn't easy. I do end up spilling some into the furnace while I attempt to pour it into the ingot cast unfortunately, but overall, the p went well. There was still some sg that I had initially missed, which I had to scoop from the surface of the ingot mold after I poured, but over all it went well. The ingot mold wasn't quite full after the one crucible was used, so I took the opportunity to reheat the first crucible and pour enough copper from that to plete the ingot. The only thi is to stop operating the impeller, and wait for the whole setup to cool down to a reasoemperature.

  As one might expect, the process of cooling took many hours. As much as Zeb and I wao work on other projects while waiting for everything to cool doere too excited to see the results of the experiment, and would find ourselves cheg on it every few minutes, which meant that we barely progressed on any of the other work that needed done, like clearing the pnts in the way of the stair stru. By evening however, things had cooled enough that we could safely hahem.

  The ingot easily came free from its cast, which I turned over into water to further cool. Thankfully, it wasn't hot enough to cause any boiling. As for the two crucibles, I ended up having to stone shape them in half to free the material inside. One had a copper puck at the bottom, with sg embedded iop, and the other had some copper holding onto sg in it. I probably process those again to get the remaining copper if it I want it. I then stone shape the crucibles back together afterwards.

  Well, we now have an ingot of copper. It's not particurly big and weighs approximately five pounds. I also put a small little ied Cu embossing in the cast, so the ingot now has a Cu bel on it. I've obviously had a few things I want to try with the copper for a while now, but wao wait until I had a semi-pure sample to work with. First, I attempt to stone shape it. Nothing. I 't do it. I figured that might be the case, but still worth a shot. , a teise ping. While not quite the same as pinging a crystal, it does have a distinct ck of noisio the ping, and it is very easy for me to tell it is an ingot shape. With some immediate tests done, I decide to put the cot in my workshop, rather than in the massive ste room. I'll probably store more there iure, but for now, I like the idea of keeping it close.

  This opens up all sorts of work that could be done now though. I could make a whole process out of smelting copper, and stockpile a bunch, but actually, as discussed, I don't have a use for it. Instead, I think what I want to try is attempting to smelt that dark rock that I suspect is an ore of an uified metal. Of course, that will require airely new process to plete. Uhe copper, which is in a natural state, this doesn't appear to be a natural metal, instead, it's chemically bound. To get the metal out will require extra work, if it is even in there.

  First, I'll o really pulverize the robsp; For now, I roughly do it by hand with stone shaping, but if it turns out to be worth it, I'll have to make a rock crusher moving forward. Sed, I'll need a flux material to act as a redu agent for the metal. Thankfully, charcoal actually work for that, so I'll have to just mix charcoal in as a powder for this test. Sea shells, if they exist, or limestone are more ideal to use generally, but for just figuring out if this is eveal, the charcoal will work fine.

  Which means I'll have to take the time to do all that for the test. Thankfully, tomorrow we should be ready for another batch of charcoal to be made, so I sit and break up stone while I watch the charcoal kiln.

  The charcoal produ went well yesterday, and I made a few crucibles with mixes of powdered rod some charcoal. Today, we'll be unloading the charcoal, and then trying our hand at melting the suspect ore.

  Once we got the furnace going, I load the loaded crucibles into the furnabsp; The melting point of maals is much higher than the melting point of copper, so once we get the fur up, we're going to have to really go hard on the k for the impeller. Zeb and I will probably o trade off with the hope of getting the temperature to a light yellow.

  Ohe crucibles get to an e-yellow glow, and they don't seem to be heating more, Zeb and I have to start trading off oing the k as fast as we . We only keep the frantic pace up for about twenty minutes before we are both so exhausted we 't keep turning the k at that pay longer. The crucibles are glowing a nice yellow, so I'm hoping they're hot enough to melt any potential metals out of the suspect ore. Although I won't know until tomorrow, si's going to take a long while for the whole furo cool down so I check the crucibles. After I rest for a short bit, I move the crucibles up into the cooling tray up above the furnace before leaving it to cool.

  Well, results are mixed. On one hand, we did recover a bit of dull silvery metal in each of the crucibles. The downside is that, for the almost two pounds of ro each crucible, we only recovered about a quarter of a pound of metal from eabsp; Which means, of whatever this metal is, it will take a lot of ore to recover a useable amount of metal. Plus we nearly exhausted ourselves to make this small amount. Oher hand, depending on the properties of the material, there is a very rge amount of the ore, so it could be worth ing up with a solution to these problems.

  To determihat though, I'll actually o do some testing oal to determine if it is even wathering. Since I have a few puck shaped pieces of the metal from the crucibles, I suppose that is what I'll work with.

  The first property I notice through simply impag the puck against my desk is that the metal is somewhat brittle, breaking along clear sheer lines. The est reveals that it's harder than copper, si is able to scratch copper, but it 't be scratched by it. It's less hard than stoill however. It also breaks when I try to bend it. From these tests, I'm suspeg that it's probably majority iron, or more specifically right noig iron.

  Pig irons are ri carbon, which leads to them being very brittle and hard, and not very useful. Which means it isn't very useful in its current form. The unfortunate aspect of it being pig iron is that to make it useful, I'd o remove carbon from the alloy. Which is a whole extra process. That is, if it even is pig iron. If it's something else, then all that work might not be worth it. Oher hand, if it is iron, then the value of having access to steel is almost immeasurable, although the process of actually getting to a reasonable amount of steel would be a whole endeavor of it's own.

  For now, I'll just set the puetal aside. As much as I would like to pursue the whole thing right now, I do have other things I work on before that point which have a higher ce of being viable.