Thank you for the kind compliments. We would love to have you attend our school someday.

I do indeed use clay graphite crucibles to make my oroshigane. In past, I tried using sand crucibles (basically made of fire clay), which were much less expensive, but I found that the temperature required that they broke apart too often.

The process of smelting iron oxide powder, also know as satetsu, ‘sand iron’, in Japanese, is actually something with which we are currently experimenting. The process is identical to that used to make tamahagane in a traditional charcoal furance, a tatara, and it certainly could be also be done in small batches with crucibles in a purpose-built fire. Indeed, we have already experimented with using our crucibles to smelt satetsu, but unfortunately our current propane smelting fire could not reach a high enough temperature to break the strong double-bonds of the oxygen in the iron-oxide. A more powerful blower could likely allow to reach the higher temperature threshold required.

One should also be aware of the large loss in mass which occurs during smelting, a result the ‘burning out’ of the oxygen molecules from the iron-oxide, to leave pure iron. Because of the inefficiency of doing such small limited batches in a propane fire, our next endeavor in experimenting in smelting satetsu will begin with building a traditional tatara.

By taking pure forms of iron, specifically electrolytic sponge iron, dekaitetsu in Japanese, and antique wrought iron, and carburizing the it, one can create a steel that is compositionally identical to tamahagane, refered to as oroshigane. The carburizing process is a product of both time and temperate, as long as the iron is in a carbon-rich environment (carbon is absorbed into iron as a gas, carbon monoxide). Because the iron in these forms is pure, without oxygen’s double bonds to have to break first, the temperature is required for carburizing iron is lower.