[Captions by Y Translator] Today, we're going to be taking a look
at a very old-fashioned way to heat up a fire, hot enough
that it can melt metal.
[Music]
I'm here again with my friend Joseph,
and we've got some leather and some other supplies,
and Joseph is going to teach us how to make a Bellows
that can heat up a fire hot enough to melt metal.
>> Is that right? >> Yes.
>> Very cool.
>> Yes, and this is for an upcoming project
where we're actually going to try making iron from scratch,
just like the Vikings did.
>> But one of the key points for that is you need to get
a fire just unbelievably hot to do that, right?
>> Yes.
Well, less hot than you think.
Because when you make iron,
you actually never actually melt it.
Melting iron like that was invented way way way
after we had swords and stuff.
>> And how hot are we going for?
>> About a little over 2,000 degrees.
>> Over 2,000 degrees.
>> Okay, so not that hot.
>> And how long does it have to go?
>> Like seven hours.
>> Seven hours.
>> That is a long time.
That would take probably several propane tanks worth of fuel,
but we're not going to use propane.
We're going to be using charcoal.
>> Yes, and cheeseburgers to power the human powered Bellows,
or maybe not cheeseburgers.
>> Here's the basic idea.
We've got a bunch of leather,
and we're going to cut and sew that into a shape
that lets us control the flow of air heating up a fire.
So let's look at some of those supplies we've got.
First off, a Russian olive tree,branch.
>> Yes, and the thing
that's important about this one is it's got nasty spikes
on it, all over the place.
>> What?
It's a fairly durable,
rigid spike and it's quite sharp,
and this is one of the tools we're going to be trying to use
to poke holes in the leather.
> So we're going to give a try and see how it goes,
trying to make holes with this to sew it together.
I mean, we're thinking primitive here.
So no sewing needle, that would be cheating.
>> We might cheat.
>> Just a little bit if this doesn't work at all.
We'll try some of the primitive,
and then for the sake of speed, we'll probably cheat.
Speaking of cheating,
these are very nicely round sticks,
and I did not harvest these off of a tree myself.
I harvested these from Walmart.
But for this having a perfectly straight smooth stick,
that's really not important for what we're going to use.
These are going to be sort of handles
at the top of our Bellows that we can open and close
as we manipulate them.
Now, we have a piece of antler.
I don't know if that's as pointy as the thorns,
but it's probably a lot stronger.
>> Yes, probably.
Bamboo.
Why do we have bamboo?
>> Bamboo is for the air pipe.
So we're going to have a bag made out of leather
with two sticks of the top that you pinch closed.
So you open up for air this way,
then you close and push down.
But the air needed somewhere to go out to go to the fire,
and that's what this is for.
>> So this is what we use to direct the air.
Yes.
Just where we want it.
Now, bamboo will burn.
What's the strategy for preventing that?
>> We will coat the tip in clay.
>> And then of course, we have leather.
This is quite a bit of leather,
and again, we cheated.
We did not tan the leather ourselves.
So we have quite a big sheet of really nice tough leather.
This is actually more industrial than it needs to be like...
>> Yeah.
>> This is pretty thick,
pretty high quality, tanned hide, and this is really a lot nicer than we need.
>> But, if it's super robust,
and that means we can use it for a long time.
Yeah.
This is artificial sinew.
In the old days,
they would take tendons from a dead animal,
but like the cow, we didn't want to do that.
So this is a replicated stuff
made of just some very fine fibers,
and coated with wax.
We'll probably use this for most of the sewing.
So what's going to be our first step?
>> First step, we need to measure out exactly
what we want the Bellows to look like,
and that's going to be dependent on how much leather we have.
>> We're going to do four side panels,
and two bottom panels.
The goal is to make to Bellows.
>> Yes.
And I think that's because that way,
as you're pumping air,
you can always have one pushing air in,
while the other one is refilling.
>> Yes, and one,
it does two things, it regulates the airflow,
and it also prevents the air from the Bellows from sucking
air in from the fire,
which would burn it, and cause problems.
>> All right, we're going to use
this very authentic primitive technology chalk marker.
So let's make four rectangles.
>> Four rectangles.
the sides,
and you are saying we want them about one cubit long,
and not quite a cubit tall.
Cubit, if you don't know,
is the distance from your elbow to the tips of your fingers.
I don't know the exact scale, but of course, as you get taller,
your arms also get a little bit longer.
So let's instead of the full qubit.
Let's just take it down by a few inches.
>> Maybe the top of the top of the first knuckles.
Very precise caveman style measuring here.
[Music]
To save time however,
we're going to use this pair of industrially
large sharp scissors.
[Music]
We've got four rectangle-ish pieces of leather cut out.
>> Yes.
So now we want a bottom piece that you had a flat.
I'm thinking just kind of like almond-shaped.
>> Yes, almond-shaped would be just about right.
>> Eyeball almond that goes out and then...
>> football.
>> You take the marker.
>> Okey-dokey.
>> I'm just going to take this piece of leather,
and hold it, sort of up in this curve shape,
and then you can just draw along that curve,
and then we'll know it's the right length.
[Music]
So we've got a bunch of pieces.
We now need to sew them together.
>> So, the order to do that in...
I figured we'll just sew
along the sides, to make kind of a envelope shape,
and then put the bottom on.
>> Joseph is going to harvest a thorn.
He just slapped me with this.
Fortunately, the part
that hit me did not seem to have any thorns on it.
>> Yeah.
>> How are we doing on stabbing a hole in leather with a thorn.
>> Well, I've broken three or four points off of this thorn.
>> Now, I actually did stab a hole
in this leather with one of these thorns before,
but I'm now struggling to do so.
It's just the the leather is winning.
There are lots of primitive ways
of making needles that can even get through leather.
There are other types of natural thorn that are harder,
that are sharper.
We've got a piece of antler that we can get through.
It's very wide, very quickly though.
So in that rich tradition of cheating,
we've also got some metal needles,
which even have eye holes
in them to stab right through the leather,
and we're going to use those, because I love metal tools.
They're great.
Poke a hole through both layers.
That stabbed through fairly easily.
We have our sinew poked through.
Kind of near the first one.
Again, it pulls the sinew through.
But now,
while we still have this loop, we take the other end,
this long end,
and poke it through that hole, and pull it all the way.
And now, when we pull that loop down tight,
we have a stitch right in place,
and we have one on the other side as well.
So we just need to keep doing that,
and go down the line, poking a hole, creating a loop,
feeding the sinew through that,
and just sewing the whole thing shut.
[Music]
And, on my second side, I am going to leave a gap.
Just a couple of inches
so that we can either just tie the pipe right onto that,
or add our little pipe sleeve.
[Music]
All right. This bag has one side, two sides, and the bottom sewn on.
I've left this gap here.
This is we're going to try and attach our pipe.
But for the moment,
we're just going to make a mess by putting some sawdust there,
and showing that if I have this bag,
and I pinch the top closed,
we get a good amount of air flying out of the exit there
so...
[Music]
Mess is everywhere.
Joseph going to keep stitching up the bottom of that one.
I'm going to start adding
some sticks onto the top and bottom of this,
and we're just going to make it,
so they fit pretty nicely in there,
and just have a few stitches.
We don't need to stitch all the way along.
I'll probably have three to five bind points.
Whatever seems like it's necessary to really hold it in place.
Open it, pulls an air from the top.
Close it, pushes the air out the bottom.
[Music]
Okay, update.
This first Bellows is I believe complete,
and in working order.
Joseph is getting really good progress.
He's got one more seam
to finish on his, and then a couple sticks and handles,
but we did want to show you where this one is.
Handles up at the top.
We've got these sticks in here.
Those are rigid.
So when we squeeze that, it holds the whole bag top shut.
In the event that that's not quite enough pressure,
although it seems to work pretty well,
you can also sort of roll it over
as you press down.
That keeps the seal even better.
These handles are there so that as I lift it up,
I can hold it open.
That way, it doesn't draw the heat back up through the pipe
into the Bellows.
It'd fill it up with ash, and it would burn.
It just takes in air from the top.
So you lift, close, and squeeze,
and it just blows a whole bunch of air right out.
This piece of PVC
is just fit into a hole that I left at the bottom.
I then wrapped a lot of this sinew down around it.
It's in there pretty nice and tight.
Holds onto the bag,
and this size PVC just happens to be the right size.
We might we might be able
to get some marshmallows shooting out of this.
Let's give this a try.
I'm going to see
if I can shoot a marshmallow into Joe's mouth.
>> Wow!
>> Slow motion replay.
[Music]
>> All right, update time.
We've got two completed Bellows bags.
How's yours working?
>> It's functional.
>> Very cool.
You're using bamboo.
So, more realistic in terms
of things you might find in the wilderness.
Although, it's kind of depends on what wilderness you have.
But there's lots of different ways you can get a pipe shape thing.
My way is PVC,
which grows on the PVC trees, of course.
Very cool.
So now, I think the next step is to test these out
with actual fire.
>> I think that's the next thing.
And we are going to be doing an iron smelt.
We're going to be taking iron ore running through the furnace,
and trying to extract the iron out of that ore.
And these what we're going to use to keep that fire
hot enough for hours and hours on end.
So let's take these out
and test them out in an iron smelt. >> Yeah, let's do it.
Our bags are made,
and we've switched out the bamboo and PVC
that we had before for this cool little bamboo forked shape.
That way we can have both of the bags going
into one spot in the furnace.
This stake is here to keep it from sliding out backwards.
So it always keeps directing the are right where we want it.
So Joseph tell us about our little furnace here.
>> So this furnace is called a bloomery stack furnace,
and the purpose of it is to transform rock, into metal.
Well, what we're going to be doing is stuffing
it full of charcoal,
and then layering it with charcoal and ore,
and ore is just a stone that contains basically rust.
And so as those burn down to the level of the air,
they're going to slowly transform chemically into iron,
and then collect in the bottom,
and then we're going to collect a big lump of it,
which is called a bloom.
Hence, why this is called a bloomery.
>> So we've got our bags,
and I think we can do a nice demonstration.
We've already got stuff burning in here.
You can see just a thick white smoke coming out of it.
Probably half of that is steam as well.
But what we can do now is we can pump with our Bellows,
and we'll watch
as this just gets hotter and hotter,
and I think pretty quickly, will start having flames coming
out of the top instead of smoke.
[Music]
Look at that.
Blazing flames coming out the top.
[Music]
Now, we've basically
just smothered all that hot fire we got.
Smoke is thick as any smoke bomb we've ever made.
Our bag bellows are up and running there.
Focusing a lot of concentrated air
into our bloom furnace.
Very cool.
>> So Joseph, the next step is to actually try and extract iron ore, right?
>> Yes, and for that, we need iron ore.
All right,
our next video we do with Joseph is going to be extracting iron
from Iron Ore using our Bloom furnace
and the Bellows.
Look for that coming soon.
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