Smelting Bog Ore As It Should Be Done
A video documents a weekend at Irish Bloomery Iron where Alec Steele observed the smelting of bog ore using a medieval blast furnace. This experience serves as a follow-up to a previous Hackaday expedition in the Netherlands, where a similar attempt yielded poor results. The Irish method proved significantly more successful, producing a usable iron bar through specific furnace design and air injection techniques.
- ▪Alec Steele visited Irish Bloomery Iron to observe the smelting of bog ore in a medieval blast furnace.
- ▪A previous Dutch team at Hack42 in Arnhem attempted the same process but produced mostly slag and very little iron.
- ▪The Irish furnace utilized a perforated clay sheet for air injection to create a venturi effect, contributing to its success.
- ▪The iron bloom was lifted out of the top of the furnace and worked into a usable bar, unlike the mol tapping method.
- ▪The article highlights the superior results of the Irish smelters compared to the Dutch hackers' attempt.
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| Original publisher | Hackaday |
| Canonical URL | https://hackaday.com/2026/09/23/smelting-bog-ore-as-it-should-be-done/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:00:11 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-23T20:04:30.667Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-23T20:04:30.667Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
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| Cluster | D2-uFyNhqmv7 · 1 stories |
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| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
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| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Smelting Bog Ore As It Should Be Done No comments by: Jenny List September 23, 2026 Title: Copy Short Link: Copy Sometimes along comes a hack with a personal angle, and in a video showing Irish bog ore smelting, we find an appropriate follow up to a Hackaday expedition back in 2019. [Alec Steele] joined Irish Bloomery Iron, for a weekend with a medieval blast furnace. Our brush with bog ore came in a trip to Hack42 in Arnhem, the Netherlands, where a team of Dutch hackers built a furnace from firebricks in an attempt to do the same thing. The Dutch attempt ended with a lot of mixed slag and very little iron, and looking at how the Irish furnace was constructed we see some clues to their success.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hackaday.
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