31
votes
Building a furnace insulated with wood ash to smelt iron in
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- Title
- Primitive Technology: Wood Ash Insulated Furnace
- Authors
- Primitive Technology
- Duration
- 15:20
- Published
- Aug 3 2023
Glad to see he's back! One thing that always sticks with me throughout these videos is just how effortlessly he starts fires. Even in humid conditions, he seems to be able to pick out the driest bits of fuel for his furnaces. Super impressive stuff!
This guy's videos are hypnotic. Always glad to see a new one from him.
If you want to see a guy who is sort of similar but kind of doing his own thing, I really enjoy Advoko Makes.
I linked his playlist of videos which show him building his summer cabin. But he has other videos too if you go to his channel. The cabin is always the best place to start though since the rest of his videos show him improving it or adding external things like a handmade boat or a water wheel for laundry.
He was gone for well over a year (living large off his prior views and the book he'd pushed I suppose), but finally came back. Still quite interesting. But ...
I really want to see him use his furnace and smelting techniques with some actual iron ore. The bacteria iron mud he's using is iron, sure, but it's obviously very, very low iron count. If he'd order in some higher grade iron ore (as a demonstration of what would happen if he had that near him, or had traded for it as a villager), I'd find it very interesting to see how various techniques and processes he's working through do with that as opposed to the low grade iron bacteria.
It's also so nice that he doesn't feel the need to "inject personality" into it. Doesn't monologue to the camera, doesn't do reaction bullshit thumbnails, doesn't stage stunt videos for "the lolz" or any of that. Just picks a task, and does the task while showing us the major steps. Which is actually quite hard to find, since most of the "content creators" only care about clicks rather than the content, and they take Path of Least Resistance. It's easier to vlog to the camera than it is to actually roll up your sleeves and work on a project, so you see most of the project "creators" vlog and hide their shortcuts. Primitive Technologies is pure content, and it's wonderful.
In the year he was gone, I believe he was working on a TV show of the same stuff he does on YouTube that didn't end up working out.
Although I agree there are acceptable ways to simulate more resource-rich primitive environments, I still think this goes against his entire ethos. He places such a huge emphasis on doing everything in situ, from scratch, and by hand. Sometimes (in the case of the brick hut) this takes him months doing monotonous tasks. He starts a fire using only friction the same tedious way, every time. I suspect that's the part of this he enjoys the most – bringing in materials from the outside would spoil it, no matter how plausible the explanation.
There's this episode of How to make everything where they got a decent amount of bog iron (same iron bacteria but concentrated of a much higher scale). They then process them in a viking furnace. I found the process remarkably similar (clay and brick furnace, tuyere with forced air, several ore charge loaded from the top). The scale of the operation is different though (there's like 10kg of ore instead of the tens of handful he has).
I wonder if Big Stack D watches this guy smelt tiny iron nodules out of microbial slime and sheds a single, patriotic, Australia-shaped tear.