Iron Smelting for Dummies

Home smelter or bloomery

In the bad old pre-Panda days (before Google jiggered their search results to downgrade content farms), freelance-driven websites had low standards for the factual quality of their content. The king of content farms, eHow.com, allegedly had standards, but those were by and large intended to format their content for maximum SEO. In other words, they considered format more important than quality: why else would we find so much utter bullshit at eHow.com? Consider, then, just how awful content must have been to be refused by eHow's vaunted content editors. It happened, though, and our researchers found this example at the (now-defunct) Suite.io. It's from sometime eHow contributor: Dianne Christensen-Hermance with her clumsy rendition of "Refining Iron Ore Processes."¹

It's a rather open-ended topic, which (we imagined) is why Dianne decided the question was "How to Smelt Iron Ore in your Back Yard." It most likely wasn't that: some eighth-grader was probably looking for a general outline of smelters, blast furnaces, and the Bessemer process for World History class. But Dianne forged ahead (pun intended) and, as she generally does, pretty much made a hash of the topic. Here's what she thinks we have to do:

"Create a Smelter: The process of refining or melting iron will need some ore. The easiest way is to go look for a few rocks that are rusty looking. This is a telltale sign the rock has some iron ore in it." 

Besides the obvious fact that looking for ore isn't part of "create a smelter," Dianne's clearly an idiot if she thinks that any old rusty-looking rock is iron ore. Apparently she figured that out, since she immediately said, "Either purchase iron ore or look for some outside. However, chances are these rocks have very little iron ore present in them and that is why they are sitting there and not being mined. In the past, people search for high-grade iron ore in swamp bogs." Where would one "purchase" (as an aside, we find the use of the word "purchase" to be an obvious attempt to make one's writing look more "professional," which typically fails) this iron ore? and just WTF is a "swamp bog"? Anyhow, DC-H goes on to describe a backyard smelter -- just badly enough that you'd probably kill yourself trying to build and or use one. Then comes Dianne's description of the smelting process: check out his mishmash of "information":

"The first load of charcoal should be put into the fire at this time, then the ore and additives. Iron typically included a portion or lime. Continually adding the charcoal and keeping the fire above the required temperature is necessary. How long the fire runs depends on how much heat is achieved, the quality of ore and the quality of the smelter. The fire could run as long as one week. Since refining iron is not an exact science, it could take longer than you think."

We wondered "at what time"? And just WTF does "Iron typically included a portion or lime..." mean, anyway? 

We pondered whether someone would ever be able to figure out the smelting process from Christensen-Hermance's description here. We read it several times and decided first, that it's so sloppy and badly written it's small wonder that even eHow wouldn't publish it; and second, you'd be taking your life in your hands to attempt to smelt your own iron with this as a reference. We did find a better "home-brew" article on-line, complete with pretty pictures and a more detailed timeline of the processing. 

Thus, for getting the topic wrong to begin with -- it should have just been an overview of the processes -- and then doing a really, really, really lousy job of describing what she did write about -- a feeble attempt at instructions for making a smelter in your back yard -- we hereby award Dianne today's Dumbass of the Day award. We sincerely hope however, that she never goes into her back yard and tries to smelt it...

¹ This website is now defunct, and archive.org's Wayback machine never made a copy of the post. Oh, well, no loss...

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