Prospecting Roadtrip and Smelting Plans

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.

( So Saturday we went for a drive )