Prospecting Roadtrip and Smelting Plans

[gfish]

Plans are afoot to go to my parent's place in Spokane next weekend and attempt to smelt some copper, old school style. Pretty basic: bowl furnace in the ground, a blower pushing air in through a tuyere pipe or two, charcoal fueling a reducing fire. Copper ore and iron oxide flux.

You can get real charcoal in grocery stores for snobby barbeques, so no problem there. Might try to pick up some sandstone pavers for the furnace itself, as a nicely traditional and easy refactory structural component. I don't think we'll bother with using real clay. The soil at my parent's place is fairly clayish, and we neither have time to cure it properly nor any real concern about the furnace lasting beyond one or two firings. It took me awhile to find a good source of iron oxide, but it turns out that Seattle Pottery Supply has it in bulk for reasonable prices. You wouldn't think it would be so hard to find rust. The tuyere pipes can just be black iron -- not galvanized -- they'd ablate over time, but will won't have any problems for a weekend of firings. We're going to cheat and use an electric blower, since none of us really wants to man a goatskin bellows for 6 hours.

But we still needed ore.


First, shadowblue did some GIS work and made us a nifty map of copper deposits in the area. We decided to drive the North Cascades Highway and check out Mazama, WA, mostly because driving the North Cascades Highway sounded like fun.



Mazama is the red flag. We took the sceniclong route on the way back. About 430 miles total, over 12 hours.



The North Cascades Highway is simply gorgeous. We came around a corner and found this vista, looking for the life of us like a hyper-detailed matte painting about 10 meters away. We stopped and stood at the edge of the road for a bit, just not believing. It was only by working your eye back, one tree at a time, could you really get a sense of the scale of it.



On a backroad outside Mazama, we found this scree slope with some fairly green rocks. So shadowblue clambered on up, sending low grade ore raining down on us. We found some decent samples there. In a very pleasant little stream down the road we found two very nice pieces, almost malachite, but they were rounded and had washed down from somewhere much farther upstream. Unfortunately I'm a dork and didn't get a picture of our collection, which is now sitting, locked, in corivax's trunk in Woodinville. Oh well.

To be sure, I just ordered a little set of Azurite-malachite-chrysocolla from ebay. If the first run with the ore we found doesn't look promising, we can use that instead. But I'm really hoping ours will work -- it will be much more satisfying. The next logical step would be to smelt some tin from cassiterite and make bronze, but we're not going to find any of that without a very serious roadtrip. Sure sounds like fun, though...

Comments

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I think I'm going to be too busy tending the furnace to get out much. But I'm in Spokane fairly regularly, so we should be able to set something up this summer. :)

[darlingfreak.livejournal.com]

I can understand that.

We need to work out something sometime though.

Also, my brother is in Seattle now so I'll be making it over there with some regularity now too.