Solo [Ironworks] Moulding Metal

[Eanos]

55 Fall, 513AV This season was a seminal one for Eanos for many reasons, not the least of which was that it marked tidemarks in his skills and his shop. Now he had a competent smith working with him who could handle all of the aspects of the shop that he did not have much interest in. It was good experience for her and it allowed Eanos to concentrate on the things that he had come here to do. He had proved to himself that he had mastered the skills of smithing well enough to produce a sword to a standard that he was pleased with. But the sword itself and the skills that made it were just a small part of the total skill set that he wished to acquire. There were two broad strands of pursuit that he followed in this quest, one smithing and the other that of wizard. Ultimately his aim was mastery of both and the ability to produce weapons the like of which had not been seen since the Valterrian. One thing that he lacked here in Syliras was the ability to ship in Isurian steel and the lack of it was something of a thorn in his side. Any attempt to go and arrange the steady supply would take up most of a year and even then there was no guarantee that it would be made available to him. Isurian steel was fabled as being the ultimate steel but he knew enough about steel to know that there were ways and means to improve and damage steels. He was not entirely convinced that it wouldn’t be possible to create a new steel here that even if it was not as good as Isurian steel, would be good enough that when enhanced by the right creation process and supported by gnosis and perhaps magecraft would be good enough that few could tell the difference. The next puzzle that needed to be unlocked was in creating that alloy of steel which would rival Isurian steel. He was fortunate that here he had the resources of an entire city behind him if he needed them. The Knights would not pass by the chance to upgrade their arms and armour and Ros already controlled both the mines but also the smelting of the ore from those mines to create all of the steel in the city. It might well be that the ores that he needed were not to be found in those mines and that he would need to look elsewhere, but the simple fact was that he did not as yet have the knowledge necessary to be able to answer those questions. Ahead of him lay a massive quest and one that would not be ended in the next year or likely even the next but then he was becoming used to those and it was why he came here where he would be challenged to discover the knowledge himself without the restrictions imposed in Sultros by the bounds of discoveries and traditions handed down through the clans and jealously guarded from the other clans.

[Eanos]

Ros had proved amenable, as Eanos had expected him to be as the two of them had a good working relationship and the same employer. Also he stood to gain as much as Eanos did from any discoveries that were made which was natural since it would be his facilities which would be used to do much of the research.

It felt odd to be working at the Ironworks again, the place where he had spent much time before moving to open up his own shop, but he soon settled into place, exchanging pleasantries and digs with the other smiths that he recognised.

It had been a long time since he had first been introduced to the skills of metalsmithing back in Sultros and he needed to remind himself of that first with simpler metals long before he made any attempt to work once more with steel. Since he was here and working with the lesser metals it was also a good time to remind himself of the skills of casting and other metal working skills that he rarely performed himself.

For his way of thinking the more he knew and could immediately draw to his fingertips then the more options that he had open to himself and the less his mind was closed and bounded by the need to make existing skills stretch to fit. Ros had provided him with a table of the alloys of copper along with a supply of those metals for Eanos to practice with.

Copper was an interesting metal for Eanos as it was one that he very rarely worked with for the metal was soft and corroded quickly. Even in alloy forms the metal remained soft in comparison to steel, but unlike steel the corrosion was rarely fatal to the metal, rather it formed quickly but then protected the metal from further corrosion unlike steel where the rust tended to carry on eating deeper and deeper into the metal.

The most common alloy to copper was of course brass which was harder and corroded less, and which had the partly dubious quality of appearing in colour when polished to look much like gold. It was created by mixing with zinc, but if the copper was mixed with tin then it produced bronze which was one of the hardest of these metals and was used often in castings such as for bells for as well as being hard it was also the most fragile when pushed beyond its strength.

There were other alloys but these two would be the starting point, and then he could start to work through the others until he was confident in his ability to both make and cast them. With that in mind he organised the work space that he’d been allocated in the part of the forge that specialised in this work, putting aside the metals that he did not intend to used immediately and setting in place all of the tools that he would need as well as making sure that the furnace was properly heated.

[Eanos]

With everything prepared Eanos could get on with the actual work itself. He checked that the furnace was correctly set up and then sorted through the metals. His intention was to make brass, and since this was his first time unsupervised he did not consider it worthwhile to be using virgin metals, at least for the copper, and instead had a hotchpotch of offcuts and broken items which were to be reused, It was inevitable that this would mean some foreign matter would make its way into the final alloy whereas with virgin metal most of that would have been eliminated when the bars were cast.

For practice as much as anything else he was going to cast the metals first into bars, improving the quality as much as he was able either by scooping off or by allowing the heat to burn away whatever could be burnt. For this he had some heavy cast iron moulds which had been supplied by the Ironworks. It was somewhat ironic he considered that he was using cast items for nearly all of the stages of this work, cast by another smith whose footsteps he was merely following, which was an unusual place to find himself when it came to smithing.

He used a hammer to break down the pieces of copper and to make them smaller then placed them into a cast iron pot so that they mostly filled it. The coal fuelled furnace was now hot and so he leaned in and placed the pot securely in the coals and sat back to watch as the outside of the pot started to heat. He pumped the bellows to drive the temperature up and noted as the bottom of the pot started to go red. As the copper inside started to melt, so the level dropped and he carefully slipped in more pieces. The copper splashed onto his fingers as he did so and he carefully wiped it off on the edge of the pot so that as little as possible was wasted.

Once the level had stopped dropping he could be sure that the mass was mostly melted and so he started to skim the surface of contaminants that floated up there. He shifted the pot off the heat a little once this started to happen; the heat flows in the the metal acting like currents in the sea and bringing up carbon and the like.

Leaving it for a moment he lifted the moulds into place and then taking the pot off the coals he poured the metal out into the trays. As he did this he found himself ignoring the stares of the other smiths, something he had once been used to when he worked here but had forgotten about, for all that he sometimes liked to shock customers in his own forge.

With the metal poured it quickly started to cool and as it did so it shrank enough that it became loose in the trays and then he was ready for the next phase.

[Eanos]

The somewhat refined copper bars were now cool enough for him to handle and so he tipped them out onto the worktop which smoldered slightly from the heat, so he quickly grabbed them with his left hand and deposited them on the anvil.

Taking out another casting pot he added in a mix of bars of copper and zinc in the ratio of three to two, the zinc being virgin metal since there was no real use for it in the forge except as a metal to be mixed in to produce alloys. As before he carefully lifted it into the furnace and set it on the coals. It made him miss the magma furnaces of Sultros though they had to be used much more carefully and were rather more suited to the smelting of iron than copper as the softer metal would have evaporated if left too long in that intense heat.

The bars softened and melted and as they did so, so he mixed them together with an iron rod then added more bars in the same ratio to fill the pot up. He continued his stirring, watching the colours change until he was satisfied that the two metals had not mixed thoroughly. He was pleased with it for it was the first time that he’d practised any proper metalsmithing since his apprenticeship in Sultros and it was good to see that he hadn’t lost any of his old knowledge.

With the brass alloy poured carefully into the trays and set aside to cool, he considered the metals that he still had to hand. The next stage of his practice would be in the casting of metals and for that he wanted to cast not only brass but also in bronze. Casting was a very different skill to his normal smithing for there he was constantly in control of the process whereas with casting there was less immediate control. It was however somewhat similar in terms of control to welding so it wasn’t that he was unused to a degree of working by experience and then waiting to see if the end result was what it should be. In both that and here he could always use his auristic vision to check on progress by examining the djed flows but it wasn’t the same as normal sight and not so easy to interpret, nor would he use it for minor work such as this as he didn’t wish to risk his health for mere curiosity.

He slipped more copper bars into the casting pot, this time adding tin instead of zinc and in a much lower ratio, using only one bar of tin to nine of copper. He had often wondered as to the nature of how just the one bar of tin managed to produce such a relatively hard metal as bronze when it was in such a low ratio. Bronze was not only notably harder than brass but it was not as prone to the green corrosion as either copper or brass, often weathering instead with a dark blackish patina.

[Eanos]

The process for the creation of the new alloy was the same as it had been for brass, and as alloys went it was relatively easy. Compared to the steel that he was used to, these alloys were relatively crude. As with the small amount of tin, he knew that it small amounts of other metals or minerals could produce very different steels. Carbon was the obvious addition to the alloy, not even being a metal itself, but by some divine magic it allowed the steel to harden as it would not without it. The forging process in a fire which was itself carbon fuelled could just as easily burn the carbon out of the steel and leave it without the ability to harden in the way that was necessary for a blades edge.

What additions would he need, he wondered, to create a new steel here which was the match or even a close second to Isurian steel? He also knew that it was very possible that he never would for such things were the result of a great deal of experimentation and even then much depended on how the metal was then smithed as to what end result could be produced. Likely even he would not live long enough to see it unless he was lucky, but if Izuran favoured him then luck might not such a big factor.

Tipping out the brass bars from the tray he stacked them carefully on the workbench, this time making sure that they had cooled enough that they would not attempt to ignite the wooden surface and poured out the alloy that he’d mixed in the same way as the brass to create new bars.

Of course these were two very well known and well used alloys were not the only ones possible and it made him curious as to how changes would modify the behaviours of the final alloys. This was indeed a field of multiple lifetimes of experimentation, and clearly had been in the past which was why they now had these two alloys that most people probably never even realised were alloys and not metals in the same way that most would not realise that steel was an alloy.

It was an intruiging problem, how to predict how an alloy would be modified by changing the bases. He suspected that knowing the answer to it would be key to being successful in finding new steel alloys. There were an almost unlimited number of possibilities and there had therefore to be a way of narrowing down the possible choices. He either needed to be able to predict the changes or to be able to test them. It certainly wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility to run a series of batches, just as he had just done and then to somehow be able to examine them in order to judge what the result was. If he could do that and record the results then he could very quickly be able to predict the changes.

There was one problem though, how to test the metals. He could probably do it with his auristic vision, to see how the djed changed and compare that with testing of the metal. But it was also impossible to use that much personal djed safely. Thoughts now overflowed as he considered how it might work for there was an answer to that. Possibly. It might be time to expand his studies of magecraft once more to produce something that could replicate his auristic vision on a regular basis, something indeed just like the special lenses that magecrafters without auristic vision used.

[Perplexity]

Riddled with Rewards!

Eanos

Blacksmithing	+3 XP
Metalsmithing	+3 XP
Logic	+2 XP

Lores :

• Copper: Soft and Corrodes Easily
  
• Brass: The Fusion of Zinc and Copper
  
• Bronze: The Fusion of Tin and Copper

Notes :

There wasn’t much I could give in the way of experience but there are some nice tasty lores for you! PM me with comments, questions or concerns.