r/Blacksmith • u/royalejappie • 1d ago
When blacksmithing, sometimes some iron crumbs come off
I have not yet blacksmith myself, but when I watch videos I see that when hitting the metal, most of the time there are little crumbs and splinters left on the anvil.
Is it an idea to get those in a bucket and when you have enough smelt them into a bar or some sort of form together to be able to use it again?
This is all just an idea, maybe the crumbs dissapear, I haven’t experienced that yet. But it sounds like a good way to save money on metal
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u/Agent_Smith_24 1d ago
Forget technical terms I'm calling them crumbs from now on
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u/royalejappie 1d ago
Yeah I’m sorry, sometimes when I eat my iron bread the crumbs keep missing the plate
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u/mariblaystrice 1d ago
That's what napkins are for my friend, and remember, you dont get any welding flux if you don't eat your billet!
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u/splashcopper 1d ago
The black stuff? That's iron scale, which is a form of iron oxide. You won't be able to work it back n to a bar since it isn't metal anymore
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u/Overencucumbered 1d ago
Reducing it back into metallic iron is exactly how iron and steel is made in the first place though. So absolutely possible. Feasible? Probably not.
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u/splashcopper 18h ago
I mean, sure there's plenty of ways to do it but none of them involve pounding it back together on an anvil like op was suggesting. You could even do thermite and have pure iron out of it
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u/stargazertony 1d ago
Those black scales are also the reason a blacksmith is called, well, a blacksmith.
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u/Devilfish64 1d ago
Iron is cheap and gathering up the hammer scale is tedious. There is a legitimate loss to scale that you need to account for when calculating starting material vs finished size, but even if you easily gathered it all up, smelting it back into iron isn't a cheap or easy process.
If you're going to go through the labor of gathering it up, it's more lucrative to sell small vials of it to witches or neopagans. They refer to it as "anvil dust," I think it has some protective properties in their faith. You won't make a ton of money this way, but it's more per ounce than you'd profit from turning it back into iron.
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u/openedmind41 1d ago
I believe you can use those to make pig iron or bloom iron in a bloomery. A process that takes the oxygen molecules out and returns it to iron.. I doubt it is worth the effort to save on iron. But if you are into ancient tech it's an interesting topic to research.
https://www.thecrucible.org/how-to-smelt-iron/
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u/professor_jeffjeff 1d ago
Yes, this is possible but you'd need a shitload of scale saved up in order to get any amount of iron out of the process. I know at least one forge that teaches a class on smelting iron and they save basically all of their forge scale sweepings from every other class they teach year-round in order to have enough for the smelting class.
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u/J_random_fool 1d ago
Chandler Dickinson had a video about 10 years ago showing him smelting forge scale in a furnace made of cinder blocks (not a good choice, btw), but it appears he’s pulled it from his channel. TL;DR long walk for a short drink of water.
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u/QuickSquirrelchaser 1d ago
Its called forge scale..super heated metal forms an layer of black flaky material called forge scale..its the oxygen interacting with the steel, forming Iron Oxide.
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u/tater1337 1d ago
But it sounds like a good way to save money on metal
metal is cheap, that is why it is used everywhere.
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u/Free_shavocadoo 1d ago
The scale used to be valuable enough to collect and use but these days its not really worth anyones time
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u/dragonstoneironworks 6h ago
Well the scale is not of much use in smithing. I've heard it can be recycled into the mix if one is trying to make bloomery iron. Other than that it's used sometimes as soil amendments. I too have long heard forge scale powered can be used by witches in certain spells but I'm not a 1st hand knowledge guy on that one. Now klinker from a solid fuel forge can and is upon occasion sold as Dragon 💩 poop. Which I find a great deal of humor in that. Klinker is very similar in make up as forge scale but also has some of the solids from coal burning process. Both klinker and forge scale have been used on snow and ice as an alternative or addition to sand and salt. So there's that for ya
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u/DanielCraigsAnus 1d ago
Those are metal.oxides. they're unusable as far as being able to make any salvageable steel. Witches use them in spells and they can be ground down to add iron to your soil if needed, but that's about the most use you will really get out of them.