Experiment Notes - LAM Clay Smelter

Reports of all of our iron smelting efforts along with more articles and information are available on the "Iron Smelting in the Viking Age" CD from the Wareham Forge.  Copies of the CD can be purchased here.

This smelt went shockingly well. When you change the ore, smelter size, and smelter construction you don't expect good results. Not the first time. Yet we had a nearly picture perfect smelt with a few very understandable issues.

For an in depth discussion of the input and output figures please see Darrell's blog of June 5th. There is also a nine minute overview video of the smelt availavle on youtube

Conclusions:

Overall set up

The physical arrangement of the site was tight but workable.

Smelter size

Generally we run smelters with a 30cm inside diameter as suggested by the archaeology of scandinavia. In this case the archaeology at LAM suggests a 20cm inside diameter. This required us to reduce the airflow and adjust the burn times to ensure the ore stayed in the reducing stack for the required time.

Ore Analog

This was a second version of the analog developed by Robert. This one is designed to match the bog ore local to L'anse aux meadows with a iron weight of 64%.

Ore weight

The archaeology at L'anse aux meadows suggested 15 Kg of slag [10Kg actually recovered] and a 3kg bloom from 18Kg of ore. We used 18Kg of (damp) analog and generated a 4.89 Kg bloom with 8.6 Kg of slag recovered.

The test was undertaken on a clean bed of sand, which allowed recording of the debris field created by the smelt, related to the known positions of the workers. This will be able to be directly compared with the records of the L'Anse aux Meadows excavations.

Layout of smelter area	Finished Construction	After drying fire	Drilling the tuyure
Liam helping	Ore Analog	Cracks developing	Temperature readings
Self tapping	Burn down	Locating the bloom	Beginning consolodation
Consolodating	Consolodating	Reconstructed	After removal
Final bloom

Reports of all of our iron smelting efforts along with more articles and information are available on the "Iron Smelting in the Viking Age" CD from the Wareham Forge.  Copies of the CD can be purchased here.