Talk:Bloomery

message: As noted above, the early paragraphs remain unreferenced.  I have therefore reinstated that template.   Peterkingiron 22:16, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unreferenced 

message: I'm stashing some reference links here for future work:
*How Stuff Works
* The Smelter's Art Experimental Iron Production at The Rockbridge Bloomery
scot 03:14, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: References

message: Some one possibly Dincher has added a cross-refernece to 'Early iron Smelting' in Smelting.  That article has had some specific references added as 'References', but I do not think that is appropriate.  Some time ago, there were a lot of articles covering similar ground and sometimes contradicting each other.  This is highly undesirable.  We should have a hierarchy of articles, so that a general one, such as Smelting refers to another giving more detail, which may in turn refer to another giving even more detail.  I merged various sections in other articles to create History of Ferrous Metallurgy.  If we have detailed articles referring to broader ones as the place for more detail, we are going to go back to the anarchic situation that I tried to sort out.  It seems perfectly legitimate to me for a wide-ranging article not to cite its sources directly, provided these do appear in the specific one to which it refers.  Comments please.  Peterkingiron 13:35, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cross-reference  

message: I have as a curiosa seen that even in 20th century they were still working bloomerys in parts of Africa. The process is wasteful but easy to work in small scale. If I find the reference again I will add it to the article. Seniorsag 14:53, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Late iron bloomerys 

message: From the beginning of the Iron Age, in the second millennium before the Christian era, iron was obtained from ores using the bloomery process, which comprised the following stages:
* a) Introduction of the crushed mineral and charcoal into a cavity or low furnace.
* b) Combustion of the charcoal, aided by a strong air current to reach sufficiently high temperatures (around 1200oC) and production of a high-reduction gas (CO).
* c) Progressive reduction of the mineral using the reducing gas, which produced a solid yet spongy lump of iron and liquid slag that had to be separated from the metal.
* d) Compacting and purifying of the bloom through hammering and the subsequent shaping of it by smithy work.
The skills and innovative spirit of the people who carried out these operations resulted in changes to them over the course of centuries. Innovations in the system affected the shape, dimensions and construction materials used to build the furnaces, the way of filling them with ore and charcoal, the procedure used for adding air, the way and point in time of separating the slag, etc. These changes progressively improved the productivity of the system and the quality of the end product. Iron-making technology spread from the Middle East to Central and Western Europe, and at some point in time difficult to determine, it made its way to the eastern Pyrenees, where iron ore was abundant. The route of its arrival may have been by land (through ancient Gaul) or by sea, by sailors from the eastern Mediterranean (Phoenicians or Greeks) who not only brought their goods to the Iberian Peninsula, but also brought their technology with them.
:I cut and pasted this from here:  CONTRIBUTIONS to SCIENCE, 1(2): 225-232 (1999) Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona The Catalan process for the direct production of malleable iron and its spread to Europe and the Americas Estanislau Tomàs* Societat Catalana de Tecnologia
:I hope someone can work this into the article J8079s (talk) 19:51, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Suggestion 

message: There appears to be some ambiguity of nomenclature associated with the word Bloomery.  In the early middle ages, probably earlier, bloomeries were used to smelt iron ore.  In the late middle ages and early industrial period, the primitive blast furnaces produced pig-iron, which was then further treated to form bar-iron.  The first stage of this retreatment, sometimes called finery, produced a slab of iron, charcoal and slag, commonly called a bloom, which was initially hammered to remove any surface charcoal and slag, producing a half-bloom.  These Finery forges were still called Bloomeries through the eighteenth-century.  These discrepancies should be made clear for people using Wikipedia, and especially for me who is not a metallurgist.
Katbun (talk) 12:41, 25 January 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you know of any suitable sources we can use?--Charles (talk) 13:58, 25 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Different meanings

message: -Removed misleading last sentence ("Molten iron was not desirable until the advent of the blast furnace") in the first paragraph. Blast furnaces were developed as a result of an increase in demand for cast iron, not the contrary).
-Made various corrections to the unsourced second paragraph :
*a bloomery is defined by its inability to melt iron, so it does not produce a range of irons up to cast iron, as clearly explained in the first reference.
*Low-carbon iron is not called "wrought" when extracted from the furnace, wrought describes the hammering process.
*The next few sentences were describing the Chinese and Japanese method of pattern welding different steels together. These steels were obtained from furnaces producing over 2 tons of steel each per week-long firing. They are not comparable to any bloomery. European smiths carburized their iron and then wrought it into steel.82.255.247.229 (talk) 15:00, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks. Can you find us references for this please?--Charles (talk) 17:05, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Done.82.255.247.229 (talk) 12:00, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bloomeries in Medieval Europe 

message: I have made a serious study of your iron-history articles, and I think the illustration of the Catalan furnace in this article is misleading to the new student.  From my other reading, the Catalan was a bloomery with compressed air supplied by a falling-water trompe.  The wiki article "Trompe" states that a trompe is a "signature attribute" of a Catalan Forge.  This is not mentioned on this page, and the selected illustration omits the trompe. 
If this "signature attribute" comment is correct, then the illustration of a Catalan Forge on this page should be replaced with the one on the "Trompe" page, which shows the trompe in detail.  
And thanks for all the work on sorting out iron-making history. It is difficult to make practical sense of it and your (collective) efforts are deeply appreciated.  Mashiro (talk) 00:07, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Catalan = Bloomery + Trompe? 

message: Neither from this article or the wiki article on blast furnaces is it clear to me what the specific differences between the two are.
Both use forced air via tuyeres, both are charged at the top and product emerge at the bottom via similar chemical reactions.
From reading both articles something like the following comparison table would be useful (these are my comparisons from reading the articles, so may not be accurate, could an expert please expand, correct and add to the article):
Bloomery                                                    	Blast furnace
Batch operation                                             	Continuous operation
Low temperature (below iron melting point)                  	High temperature produces molten iron
Low volume forced air                                       	High volume forced air/oxygen, increases combustion temperature
Produces solid iron particles with high levels of impurities	Produces higher purity molten iron
Lkingscott 08:49, 4 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Difference between bloomeries and blast furnaces 

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thread_title:  External links modified