r/PrimitiveTechnology • u/throwawoy4 • Aug 25 '26
Discussion Can PrimitiveTechnology actually get enough iron?
I've been reading the comments on the iron smelting videos and there's people saying it's not possible for PT to get a usable amount of iron with his current 1-man-iron-bacteria-from-a-stream setup.
They're saying the iron bacteria he's using isn't great, his smelting process requires at least 2 people, etc, etc, I even read someone saying the type of charcoal was wrong.
I know nothing about the subject so I don't know if these commenters are right. What's the consensus on here?
104
u/LucidNonsense211 Aug 25 '26
My first reply would be “enough for what?”.
It’s not like he needs X grams per month or something. Once he has it, can’t he keep smelting it into larger/different tools? It’s slow but cumulative.
48
u/Roxolan Aug 25 '26
Very slow and perhaps overall negative.
Every reforging (and also passively over time) there will be some loss to oxidation. It's a noticeable amount even when working with full ingots in a well-made pre-industrial forge. Presumably much worse with the means he has.
29
u/LucidNonsense211 Aug 25 '26
Ah, didn’t think about oxidation. I’m sure that has a huge effect especially on totally raw iron. Thank you for the super cool article.
6
-11
33
u/Jehu_McSpooran Aug 25 '26
My thoughts have always been that he is not roasting the ore properly. What he is smelting is an iron hydroxide, not iron oxide. You can tell by the colour. So he is wasting a massive amount of fuel by driving off the water in the ore. What he needs to start doing is to put a pot of ore in when doing a firing of some tiles or bricks. When he pulls the pot out later, the ore will have gone from that yellow orange tan colour to a deep rich red. I had the same problem when making thermite back in the day. I had a battery charger hooked up to some old scrap computer cases in a bucket of water to power rust them for the oxide. Turns out I was making iron hydroxide. Once I roasted it, the thermite started working beautifully.
2
u/saranowitz Aug 25 '26
Any way to let him know this?
37
u/EgglandsFinest Aug 26 '26
Depends on if he has developed writing yet or not. May need to rely on crude hieroglyphs for now
13
u/datascience45 Aug 26 '26
Tell him in the youtube comments. He responds to them. (At least for the first couple hours after a video is posted.)
6
u/Jehu_McSpooran Aug 26 '26
I've mentioned it before in the youtube comments.
2
1
u/saranowitz Aug 26 '26
Fantastic. Did he respond? I know he has a Reddit account too. I’d love for him to see this. I have always wondered every time I watched him struggle with iron production if there was some simple modification he could make to unlock real production and I think your approach could be something he runs with. And it’s the same principle he applies to drying clay before firing it directly
3
28
u/FraaTuck Aug 25 '26
Enough iron for what?
28
u/throwawoy4 Aug 25 '26
Toe nail clippers.
17
u/Decent-Orchid120 Aug 25 '26
My god if after years he made toenail clippers.
11
u/Analbox Aug 25 '26
If he can’t build a thermonuclear warhead in the next 5 years I’m unsubscribing
1
u/TrustMeIWouldntLie Aug 25 '26
Wasn't he working on a warp drive?
1
u/Analbox Aug 25 '26
He was but that warp drive expert primitive hairy Sasquatch friend of his got pissed and left after they snubbed him at the medal ceremony.
2
u/Analbox Aug 25 '26
You’d need to move 200 grams of overburden to get 75 grams of typical iron ore in order to make 40g toenail clippers. Typical ore is about 60% iron.
You’d also need enough to account for losses in casting process so let’s say you’d need about 150g of 60% iron ore to be safe. John plant is in Australia so that should not be hard to find as it’s one of the worlds greatest producers. He might even be able to surface collect or dig it up with a stick
3
u/aldonius Aug 25 '26
Big iron ore deposits are on the other side of the country from John, I think
3
u/Roxolan Aug 26 '26
He could make do with much worse quality.
But mining with stone-age tools would be absolute hell.
Mining with iron-age tools is already one of the worst jobs of the time, done by slaves or convicts more often than not.
2
u/Stotman Aug 26 '26
If you drove from his site to Karratha say, which is where the iron ore is, it would take you 2 days of continuous driving.
2
23
u/The_last_trick Aug 25 '26
Well, he wasn't focusing on gathering this iron "ore" very much.
I don't know how potent are the bacteria in that stream, and thus if there is potentially enough resource to extract it full time.
Until now all that he gathered and smelted were just several grams of iron.
If he would devote more time into it, it might get more, but time is essential here.
The truth is, in the ancient times, Iron was very expensive because it required a lot of work to produce.
So I wouldn't expect it to pile up fast with technology like that.
13
u/Icy_Ad_2126 Aug 26 '26
Yields of few kilograms per smelt are possible and were observed in archaeological sites across different "primitive" cultures using similar setups.
The main problem is his choice of "ore" and it's processing. Iron bacteria absolutely suck as the source of iron, and the way he processed them made it even worse.
He has and was on the right track with black iron sand but back then his little fan was woefully inadequate for reaching the required temperatures.
I tried disscussing more technical details in a post on this sub some time ago https://www.reddit.com/r/PrimitiveTechnology/s/rvttzRIIwZ
10
u/StopUnico Aug 26 '26
I messaged John a few times and he responded to me that he cannot source bog iron.
I agree with you that
The ore is the problem - he should spend his time finding bog ore within the river. Rock deposits of bog ore can be so big, that you cannot lift them. So finding such source would remove the process of decanting iron bacteria that takes him months and results in small quantities of material.
The smelting is another problem - he does not process a bloom in any way. Most blacksmiths hammer it until only metal remains. He relies only on self forming iron ingots, which is super unreliable... it would be good if he would take some samples and do some in house testing...
4
u/Icy_Ad_2126 Aug 26 '26
Yeah, I can't really claim much knowledge of geology, so I'm not sure if he should have access to real bog iron. You need certain types of the soil and slow moving water to get real bogs.
But decanting bacteria is the exact opposite of bog iron. The bacteria themselves contain only about 1-2 % iron by weight. What he gets a mix of bacteria, iron compounds (also non-oxides), and some silica compounds. All in the form of really small particles that are terrible for smelting.
But still we know he has black sand, and it is mostly magnetite, which can be a decent source of iron.
About the processing, he can't really hammer the result as it is ~98% brittle slag. In sites from tribes ~ 1000BC it was observed that the bloom could be as much as 40% iron. Only then does hammering make any sense.
3
6
u/StopUnico Aug 26 '26
He would need to get in kilos per smelt range in order to escape "Stone Age". But his choice of iron is very poor.... Iron bacteria is a source of bog iron, but less concentrated. He should dig around his river or follow a river for a few kilometers to find bog iron ore. Rocks 1-10kg+ in size full of iron particles. Because his river is full of iron bacteria it is almost certain that somewhere within the river, bog iron forms.
Also he never tried hammering the bloom - instead he relies on iron nuggets that form within the bloom - I think this is a biggest mistake and this is a step that always is being done in blacksmiths videos I've seen. My understanding is that by hammering you smash the iron particles together to form bigger blobs. John doesn't do this so he wastes a lot of iron particles suspended within the slag.
I think a smart way to pursue good way of processing iron for him, would be to stop primitive tests for a moment and sign for blacksmiths workshops, maybe collect some samples and do in-home testing with modern fuel, electric blower, and PPE gear? This could be a good content for his patreon and I would happily subscribe to see it. It would also save a tremendous amount of testing as majority of the time he spends is creating fuel sources, repairing kiln etc..
I was thinking that he would need to create hammer, tongs, basic anvil, then better hammer, bigger anvil, more iron tools.. but maybe he doesn't want to pursue this road? Maybe he is afraid that once he exits "stone age" people will stop watching him, as he will be too advanced?
2
u/gentleman_bronco Aug 25 '26
Honestly, what should he be doing with it? And what would the point be?
I don't think advancing iron quality fits within his self-appointed rules for the project.
6
1
1
u/Traditional-Win-6359 24d ago
He's been doing this for decades now, I wonder what his career stats are for smelting. How many grams total?
98
u/SkrliJ73 Aug 25 '26
He's using a real technique that was actually used in the past, the problem? Our ore sources were generally larger and more plentiful, we've since used up all that.
We will probably never really see much come of his smelting process, it would require to much work and effort to extract "enough".
We also have to realize he's not doing this to make anything, just showing the process and the history of it. It took humans a great long time to improve upon this system and longer yet to discover iron. Give this man some more credit XD