[Artemisia] Bloomery preview

[Catherine Helm-Clark]

If you go to http://groups.google.com/group/metalgeeks/
I just uploaded a bunch of pictures on the iron ore collecting trips
to get enough iron ore to do a smelting run.  There's a map view
image of all the places we got to or tried to get to but couldn't.
There are also two overhead images of the Thomas Pit where we
got most of the ore.  There are  several photos of the trip to the
Thomas Pit, where we picked up about 100 pounds of magnetite
in about 2 hours using magnets (it's not period but it is fast...and in
the heat out on the sagebrush desert north of Fallon Naval Air
Station, I will cheerfully resort to a safe and quick "cheat"  to pick
up that much iron ore).  There is so much magnetite in the tailings
piles that it's practical to use magnets (in period, people would
have dug a hole in the ground - very slow and very expensive
and a lot of work...).

There is one picture of the old open pit.  You can actually see the
magnetite vein sticking up in the wall of the pit (hint: it's black to
dark grey and doesn't get all the way to surface level). We didn't go
into the pit and frankly, no one should.  I was in that pit 20 years
ago and it was dangerous then.  These days, the road I walked into
the pit 20 years ago has now slid out about half way down, making
it  even more dangerous.  It's a good thing that the grade of iron in
the tailings is high enough to collect with a magnet or I might have
had to drive to Missouri to get my iron ore.

The pictures are not in any particular order.  Their sizes are between
a half a meg and a meg, in case someone is stuck on dial-up where
download time is an issue.

Set-up for the bloomery looks to be on track.  I anticipate the
smelting run to start sometime in the late afternoon on Wednesday
at Uprising.

ttfn
Therasia, pyromaniac