• Synapse@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Primitive technology has put out several videos about smelting iron, it’s very interesting! It shows how labour and energy intensive it is. The quantity of charcoal he uses to obtain few grams of iron !

    • Skua@kbin.earth
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      3 months ago

      The fact that he’s not even working with ore is wild too. The guy just gathers some orange slime from a river and then turns it into a working knife

      • Dagnet@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Slime instead of ore and charcoal instead of coal, he is making iron on the hardest difficulty setting

        • Skua@kbin.earth
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          3 months ago

          He literally only works with what he can gather and make himself from the area he works in, which is a forest in the north of Queensland, Australia. So the charcoal is made from the local trees in a furnace made from clay from the banks of the nearby river, and the slime is iron bacteria that grow in the river

      • plactagonic@sopuli.xyz
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        3 months ago

        It is probably the first source of iron used by humans. These sludge/mud sources are pretty clean concentrated sources of iron oxides because of how they form.

        It is just easiest way to make iron, they aren’t used now because there’s not much iron in them.

        Edit: I mean they are small

    • NegativeNull@lemmy.worldOPM
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      3 months ago

      I love that channel!! I only recently learned you can turn on Closed Captioning and he talks about what he’s doing by text.

      • Synapse@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Yes, that’s very cool. It’s a great way to make the video more informative without disturbing the peaceful atmosphere.