[Ansteorra] Pyromaniacs Unite!

Dr. C. M. Helm-Clark Ph.D. cat at rocks4brains.com
Mon Feb 11 20:41:58 PST 2008


Good evening, gentle cousins,

I can find no fault and certain much to praise in the
nine days that I have been a subject of this fair
kingdom. But since these funny flowery phrases are a bit
of a stretch for me, even on good days, let us now do
without them and get back to plain speaking:

the hospitality that I and my husband have received
since we got here (to quote someone I overheard this
weekend at kingdom A&S) certainly does not suck.

or to put it otherwise:

golly gee wowee!

Having been waylaid...well, maybe not waylaid, per se,
but definately subject to the undiluted attention of
a certain laurel from Bryn Gwlad (did I spell that
right?), it has come to my notice that there may be
a few other folks around here other than myself who might
be interested in one of my favorite SCA hobbies: making
iron, from rocks, in a bloomery, with lots of charcoal
and lots and lots and lots and lots of FIRE!!!

Bwahahahahahahah!!!!!!

...ahem, excuse me, cough cough, hack...ok, I'm better
now, really, I'm fine, really...

as I was saying, lots of fun with reducing flames in a 
early to mid Medieval bloomery furnace built to torture
innocent little rocks that never hurt anyone or even fleas
before and turning them into "blooms," which are tortured 
further to make them into wrought iron.

If you have been to Pennsic, you may have seen people
there who do something like this... The folks who do the
bloomeries at Pennsic are the folks who taught me (and
when I can make it to Pennsic, you'll find me down at
the furnaces, cranking the bellows or mixing cob or
shovelling charcoal and rocks). I'm still on the learning 
curve in leading my own smelting crew but I get better all
the time and with good enough advance notice, the experts
from Pennsic will come and teach and help too if at all
possible.  It's a conspiracy, you see, to get all sorts
of otherwise untainted SCA folks and turn them into maniac
metal geeks who gather in the dark of night and play with
lots and lots of fire...

I'm not advertising for a crew yet (and I already have
two volunteers without trying...must me a lot of fellow
metalgeeks hiding down here...  ;).  However, I do need
some help.  The first thing you need to smelt iron is a
pile of iron ore.  I have an excellent site to collect
iron ore but it's a two day drive from here... So I have
been researching potential locations within a reasonable
drive from Raven's Fort, which is where we are moving to.
And to that end, I have some questions.  First: could
someone please tell my geographically challenged self where
Rusk or Cass counties are?  And where is LLano?  I do know
where the Guadalupe mountains are, but how long a drive is
it from Raven's Fort/Stargate to get there?

Last, and this will take some thinking on someone's part,
is that every bloomery needs a home.  A bloomery needs
about a 40 feet square to be safe.  You build them out
of cob, and sometimes, cob on a willow frame depending on
your soil, and they are not permanent.  They get built, 
fired and then knocked down to recover the iron bloom.
They have a life of two to four days max.  But they need
a home during their short existence where they won't set 
the world around them on fire or evoke the wrath of the
homeowner's association or the inner city fire marshal...
If you think you might have an adequate home for a few
days for a bloomery and the pyromaniacs who will feed it
rocks and charcoal, please contemplate if you could possibly
host such a thing and when it might be possible.

You can find pictures of the bloomery I and a few pyromaniacs
from Artemisia and An Tir built and fired this last June at:
http://groups.google.com/group/metalgeeks/files
There are pictures of the building and firing plus some
pictures of one of the trips to find and collect the iron
ore we used in the furnace. This should give you a good idea
of what's involved. (ok, we cheated, we collected magnetite
and since we lacked a horde of peasants to dig us an iron mine
on the plans of Agricola, we used old speaker magnets we dragged
around behind us on string... ;)

Thank you for your time and attention.

ttfn
Therasia, metalgeek, new to town 








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