Iron Smelt Demonstration at ICMS - overview

Strictly speaking, the demonstration described here was not mounted as part of DARC. As Neil and I were both referring to DARC and handing out those business cards, I thought the event should be described here as well as via the Wareham Forge / Hammered Out Bits blog.


On Saturday May 12, I mounted an iron smelting demonstration at the 48th International Congress for Medieval Studies, at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo MI.

The two day presentation was sponsored by AVISTA - The Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science and Art

The images bellow are scooped from the MiLive / Kalamazoo Gazette web site :


All images by Matt Gade
You can view an article by reporter Theresa Ghiloni, along with the sideshow of full sized images by following this link.

There was also some video shot of the extraction by fellow researcher Dr. Mike Cramer


My assistant and smelting partner Neil Peterson does figure dominate in the video and images above! Excellent work was done by conference members Keeney Swearer and Lisa Anne Conner for both the build and smelt days. 'David' helped on the build, 'George' was the second striker seen.

I would like to thank Steve Walton of AVISTA for organizing the demonstration.


For those curious:
Ore type : DD Analog, enriched with hammer scale
Ore total : 25 kg
Bloom weight : 5.4 kg

More images and detailed report in the works