[HN Gopher] Making iron from sand [video]
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Making iron from sand [video]
Author : manuelabeledo
Score : 184 points
Date : 2022-09-02 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| hn8305823 wrote:
| You can also make (extract) Iron from corn flakes:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emXo7l42vRA
| knodi123 wrote:
| yeah, but the economics on that aren't as efficient. ;-)
| samatman wrote:
| If you like the Primitive Technology channel (and if you don't,
| why are you here?) I'd like to suggest Advoko Makes. It's not
| stone age, it's a lawyer from St. Petersburg with a cabin up in
| Karelia. A different take on going out into the wilderness and
| domesticating a little patch of it, his ingenuity and
| craftsmanship really shine through.
| Nokinside wrote:
| In practice it's better to go dig limonite from bottom of the
| lakes, rivers where it has already been concentrated. Bog iron
| (mostly goethite) from bogs is also a good source of iron.
| bertil wrote:
| I believe that the blade he shows early was made in a previous
| episode from bog iron.
| advisedwang wrote:
| A lot of comments here are talking about starting a civilization
| from scratch or ancient practices. Those are interesting topics
| but be aware that's not really what the "Primative Technology"
| channel is about. He's really just a hobbiest seeing what he can
| do from scratch without modern tools. He's not practicing for a
| collapse or reconstructing the past.
| chasil wrote:
| Iron is actually "made" in the silicon-burning process, in a
| sufficiently large star, from the perspective of stellar
| nucleosynthesis.
|
| It would be fair to say that this guy is refining iron.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon-burning_process
| 1024core wrote:
| jpatt wrote:
| This comment reminded me of a neat video I saw where
| reconstructing the past is the explicit intention:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajqort8ldXA.
|
| Starting from 1997, they picked a year 1229 as the simulated
| start date, then worked to build a castle using, for the most
| part, only extraction, refinement, and building practices from
| that year. They may adopt new technologies as they were found
| in 1230, 1231, etc. as the years progress.
|
| Apparently some of the folks restoring Notre Dame went to
| apprentice there for a little while to learn some of the
| woodworking techniques needed for their work on the cathedral.
| sylware wrote:
| A corollary in the digital domain is the bootstraping required
| for modern elf/linux based OSes:
| https://bootstrappable.org/projects.html (aka moving gcc to c++
| was a huge mistake).
| javajosh wrote:
| It's like watching someone work at civilization's command-line.
| vhiremath4 wrote:
| Beautiful way to put it haha
| gradascent wrote:
| or writing assembly code
| narrator wrote:
| Okay, now build a 3nm semiconductor fab from scratch to record
| the video on. I wonder how long that would take. Let's assume
| that the engineering for the whole thing was perfect and already
| done, you have 1000 workers, every worker is perfectly
| coordinated, didn't screw up and worked say 60 hours a week. 40
| or 50 years? Longer? The prospecting and mining all the unusual
| metals, and finding all the energy generating materials for the
| power plant would take half the time I'd imagine.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| From scratch? Over a thousand years. You will have to implement
| all kinds of processes. Even making basic things like plastics,
| optical glass.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| There's some speculation that a collapse of civilization at our
| current point would be difficult to undo, as we've mined a
| whole bunch of the easily accessible stuff and have to delve
| miles underground or sift through megatons of ore for the rest.
| [deleted]
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Easily available coal and oil is more likely issue. But I
| think that wood can be a replacement for energy source. It's
| not as cheap so progress will be limited until better energy
| sources will be built.
| 8note wrote:
| Idk, most of the stuff we've mined is concentrated in
| existing stuff or in landfills.
|
| Finding completely new ores could be a challenge, but most of
| the stuff is just around on the surface now
| jayd16 wrote:
| Metals can be recycled but I assume they mean oil.
| ithkuil wrote:
| A lot of history happened before people started using
| petroleum and its derivates
| jjk166 wrote:
| Except if our society was to collapse there would be brand
| new massive veins of resources extremely close to the surface
| and with incredibly high purity in the form of the old cities
| and infrastructure that we already built. Eventually they
| would have to make some jump from recovering previously
| collected resources to exploiting new sources, but by that
| point they would already have reached levels comparable to
| us.
| alach11 wrote:
| We would be missing the cheap energy from hydrocarbons.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If civilization collapsed today, a bunch of the Powder
| River coal would still be there.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| No fossil fuels though.
| jjk166 wrote:
| The fact we happened to utilize cheap fossil fuels does
| not prove that fossil fuels are necessary for an advanced
| civilization to develop. One might even argue our
| prolonged use of fossil fuels was a mistake.
| [deleted]
| WJW wrote:
| Most of the early industrial revolution was done with
| water wheels, steam engines came much later. Since most
| of the iron and copper extraction would be much much
| easier since you could loot them from pre-collapse
| cities, it could be a wash.
|
| And of course if even a single library survives mostly
| intact then our successors will get an absolutely massive
| jump start. Just a single "principles of physics" college
| textbook contains centuries of research.
| t3estabc wrote:
| That
| bertil wrote:
| Detail at the beginning of the video, but if the metallic sand is
| heavier, why not wash sand and collect the bottom? Is the sluice
| helping much?
| umvi wrote:
| There's an anime called "Dr. Stone" which also explores the
| concept of starting civilization over with nothing but modern
| knowledge. The protagonist basically has all of Wikipedia
| memorized so that he can make optimal choices to advance
| technology given the resources at hand.
|
| It's kind of silly and often hand wavy (especially when it comes
| to how much labor is _actually_ needed to realistically produce
| refined materials). And it has the usual eye-roll-inducing shonen
| anime tropes. But if you like the "Primitive Technology" YouTube
| channel, you might get a kick out of "Dr. Stone".
| domador wrote:
| On a related note, you might be interested in the book "How to
| Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time
| Traveler" by Ryan North. It addresses that idea, of restarting
| civilization and reinventing the technology that has been most
| helpful.
| vitiral wrote:
| Huh, this is pretty much my personal project (civboot.org), but
| I've never heard of Dr Stone!
| mgaunard wrote:
| It was a manga serialized in Shounen Jump, the anime is merely
| an adaptation.
| lhorie wrote:
| Not quite as pre-historic, but along similar lines, I quite
| enjoyed Honzuki no Gekokujou (Ancendance of a bookworm), a
| series about a book-loving girl reborn as a sickly poor
| commoner child in a fantasy world and her attempts to create
| books (and other modern products) from scratch.
| connicpu wrote:
| Definitely echoing this one, the light novels are incredible
| for anyone looking for something fun and casual to read. It
| deviates a bit more into the fantasy and political drama
| arena as the series goes on, but you still get fun references
| to reinventing products from our world all throughout.
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| Using a primitive sluice to extract heavier particulate matter
| (presumably mostly iron or some form of iron oxide -- since iron
| is one of the most common elements in the earth's crust) -- is
| absolutely brilliant!
|
| (I suppose if you were a survivalist, and you were "cheating"
| (not going through all the necessary steps to realize iron
| without modern tools), you could simply use a portable neodymium
| magnet to go through large amounts of dirt -- whatever particles
| stick are "mostly iron" ore -- which can now be processed
| further, such as being smelted, etc.)
|
| Related:
|
| How To Make Everything - Smelting Iron from Rocks (Primitive Iron
| Age Extraction):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUn6LzakHsM
|
| Good and Basic - Smelt Success! (Iron Smelt #8):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6_zVvG4FNo
| code_duck wrote:
| As a kid I was fascinated by the extraction of iron from sand
| using a magnet. I'd hang out in sandboxes on playgrounds and
| collect it. I figured out you could wrap the magnet in a plastic
| bag for easy removal of iron filings. Last I recall I had filled
| two and a half peanut butter jars.
| [deleted]
| lostlogin wrote:
| There are beaches on New Zealand's west coast that are black
| iron sand. It's used to make steel at Glenbrook new Auckland.
| The sand is hot as all hell in summer and it gets into
| everything, things with magnets in particular. Watching people
| cross the sand in summer is amusing. Patients with it on them
| need a good wash before MRI scans - a known hazard in radiology
| here.
| rendall wrote:
| This should make playing Minecraft easier
| sheeeep86 wrote:
| Thank you for this, I always knew that if I had to restart
| civilization from scratch I would have to go without anything
| digital because I understand the way thing work abstractly, but I
| could never make it happen. At least now I can think back on this
| video and wonder what magical tricks he did during those moments
| when the scene fast forwarded and magically progress was made.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Probably easier to just scavenge stuff, if you're fortunate
| enough to survive the initial fallout/disruption from say a
| nuclear war there's going to be a lot of stuff and not so many
| people.
|
| David Gingery's book "Build your own metalworking shop from
| scrap" is a very fun read though
| blackboxlogic wrote:
| This is "Primitive Technology". It sounds like you're looking
| for a "Post-Apocalypse Technology" series. I would watch that
| as well.
| jjk166 wrote:
| There will be lots of stuff, but what are the odds that
| exactly the thing you need will be available and in working
| condition? If you can make something entirely from scratch,
| you can make any subset of it from scratch. More generally,
| developing the means to do something yourself gives you a
| much deeper understanding than simply utilizing someone
| else's solution.
| inasio wrote:
| In the description of the video on youtube he often explains
| how long the full project took, and clarifying what took
| longest, it's always much longer than I expect (in the
| trebuchet video I think the problem was that collecting bark to
| make the rope took a very long time)
| skykooler wrote:
| Watch the video with subtitles on - he explains everything he's
| doing and why he's doing it.
| bergenty wrote:
| Like what? He's pretty assiduous about showing everything on
| camera or explaining it in the cc. Do you have cc turned on?
| pcorsaro wrote:
| He shows all the processes in great detail, but he definitely
| cuts out the extremely long hours of repetitive hard work he
| puts in that would be boring for the viewer to watch. For
| instance, when he makes bricks, he'll show one trip to the
| creek for the water, all the mixing, shaping and drying, etc.
| for one batch, then he fast forwards through the dozen more
| batches he does.
| reidjs wrote:
| I think those deleted scenes are hours upon hours of tedious
| labor.
| tootie wrote:
| His blog will usually tell you how long he actually worked on
| things. Some of them are surprisingly fast. But he is also
| probably not posting all of his failures.
| knodi123 wrote:
| sure, notice how he says things like "3 double handfuls of
| charcoal, 3 single handfuls of iron-bearing sand", or "dry
| fire for one hour before trying to smelt", etc. Any time he
| mentions a number or a ratio, I guarantee it's hard-won
| knowledge that took ages to come up with (even if it was
| one of his ancestors that did it, and he just learned it
| from a book).
| ithkuil wrote:
| And/or a combination of "it worked with 3 handful; I'll
| note it down and not mess with it"
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly - he'll show you the step, and then either ff the
| waiting, or ff the repeating the step over and over and over
| again.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I once went on a foraging walk with an expert forager. It was fun
| and entertaining and sort-of-useful. But he'd say things like
| "see this seed" _holds up VERY tiny plant with VERY tiny seed_
| "if you collect enough of these you can grind then up to make
| flour and then make bread."
|
| The whole thing made me less excited about foraging and more
| excited about how frikkin amazing a supermarket and global supply
| chain is.
|
| This video gives me the same feeling. Thank fuck people figured
| all this out for us a long time ago.
| jxramos wrote:
| we've been getting into gardening a bit more this year and
| looking at all that's involved with buying a can of beans or
| veggies or whatever I look at those things with a whole new
| appreciation. We don't just pay for the raw produce from some
| place, we pay for all the labor that went into cleaning and
| packaging, and everything that brought that piece to us. When
| you grow your own you need to do all the prep and washing and
| canning etc if you so choose. It's quite a chunk of labor to
| commit to.
| showerst wrote:
| If you're not familiar with this channel, you're in for a treat!
|
| Turn on closed captions to get an explanation of what's going on.
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| I was afraid this was going to be a "fake" primitive technology
| channel... but it seems that this one, "Primitive Technology",
| is actually the _only_ real one! It was even used as "a
| baseline for what SHOULD be achievable in a natural setting"
| [0]
|
| The video hyperlinked below is a fascinating debunking of most
| other "primitive" channels.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvk63LADbFc
| tootie wrote:
| Yeah, this guy is the OG. There's a few exposes on other
| channels and how they have crews and machinery off camera
| doing most of the work. This guy is real.
| JamesUtah07 wrote:
| This guy basically invented the genre and everything's else
| has been copping his success. Most can't do the stuff he does
| and to differentiate they just make stuff up.
| jandrese wrote:
| I remember after watching one of his videos YouTube started
| recommending all of those other primitive construction
| videos.
|
| So many shots of a shirtless Asian guy poking at the ground
| with a stick and walking off with a scant handful of dirt
| cutting to a 10x10x10 foot hole in the ground with
| perfectly square sides and the guy poking at the bottom of
| the hole with the same stick. Laughably bullshit.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| And with mini bucket excavator tracks surrounding the
| hole, no less.
| inerte wrote:
| Blisters on his hand, cuts on his foot, dirty all over the
| shoulder.
|
| I remember when he was posting more frequently (I guess
| there has been a hiatus over the last 2-3 years) I would
| step away from the Friday evening company all hands to
| watch his new video as soon as I saw the notification.
| Which makes me think, perhaps this channel is still the
| only one I actually have "click the bell to be notified".
|
| AAA content.
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| > hiatus
|
| He was writing a book which he now sells.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| The same thing happened with the hydraulic press channel.
| Copycats emerged there as well.
| untech wrote:
| Can you post a link to it? Sounds interesting.
| kube-system wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/c/hydraulicpresschannel
| kazinator wrote:
| Oh most of those videos are _obviously_ staged; but they are
| well-done and entertaining.
|
| I watched one of them recently with my 3 1/2 year old, who
| loved it, displaying amazing attention span through the whole
| thing and making comments like how they nicely made this and
| that.
|
| Why would anyone waste their energy debunking that; but go,
| go, you champion for the egregiously gullible, I suppose ..
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I also recommend buying his book [0] as a means to support his
| awesome work. I will almost certainly never actually do any of
| this, but it's fun to read anyway! Especially after watching
| the videos of him doing it.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/Primitive-Technology-complete-
| making-...
| gruez wrote:
| >I also recommend buying his book [0] as a means to support
| his awesome work
|
| He has a pateron. If you don't want the book and only want to
| support his work that's probably the better route.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| It's mildly humorous to me that the book is available on
| Kindle.
| inasio wrote:
| The youtube description for each video has a lot more details,
| especially on how long the different steps take.
| shireboy wrote:
| This guy is an absolute gem. Quality content every single post
| danw1979 wrote:
| I've watched Jon's videos for years now without knowing he
| added captions... thanks for the tip !
|
| He used to write a blog to go with each video which I really
| enjoyed.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| alephxyz wrote:
| Reminds me of thetoasterproject.org
| verytrivial wrote:
| The first I recall seeing was the art/science project
| "Immaculate Telegraphy". This was the first time I saw, or
| perhaps felt, that memory and knowledge is also imparted into
| the tools themselves -- _knowing_ what to do is not enough,
| there 's a bunch of subtle boot-strapping steps that need to
| bake progress into actual artifacts too. And also how much of
| this extra-cranial knowledge is taken for granted now.
|
| https://immaculatetelegraphy.tumblr.com/
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Yeah the bit where his hut was full of smelter fumes reminded
| me of how the toaster creator poisoned themself tring to refine
| metal
| anticristi wrote:
| I feel so privileged being born after the industrial revolution.
| jandrese wrote:
| One of the things that really stands out is just how much wood
| goes into every gram of iron he extracted. That charcoal pile was
| huge and it was only enough for a dozen or so BB sized chunks of
| iron. The limitation on the availability of iron in primitive
| times seems mostly limited by the size of the nearby forest and
| how good you are at converting them into charcoal.
| bertil wrote:
| The same observation is likely true for a lot of carbon-
| intensive goods. I've read how much carbon goes into a kilo of
| beef, but I've never seen a graphic representation.
| netman21 wrote:
| Why England was deforested.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| This is indeed true, and Bret Devereaux has written about it
| extensively on ACOUP:
| https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
| Lucasoato wrote:
| Trigger warning: not a Minecraft video.
| pvorb wrote:
| Now imagine if that was the process of getting iron in
| Minecraft.
|
| I never understood why some people think that games must be
| realistic to be fun.
| nathias wrote:
| also a knife from bacteria
| holoduke wrote:
| Does this guy lives in the perfect spot to do these things?
| Making clay seems to be easy. Large quantities of metals in the
| ground. Never cold, plenty of wood everywhere.
| soperj wrote:
| He used to live in the city in Australia and go out to a piece
| of property owned by a friend, based on the amount of money
| that he's made from his channel though I think he now bought a
| property just to do this. He was a lawn maintenance guy if I
| remember correctly.
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _Never cold, plenty of wood everywhere._
|
| From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology
|
| > _Primitive Technology is a YouTube channel run by John Plant.
| Based in [Far North Queensland] in the Australian state of
| Queensland,_
|
| From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_North_Queensland
|
| > _Far North Queensland has a tropical climate and as such, the
| name Tropical North Queensland is sometimes used to refer to
| the region, mostly due to the tourism industry._
|
| > _Making clay seems to be easy._
|
| I agree. [At least the rivers I know have plenty of clay.]
|
| > _Large quantities of metals in the ground._
|
| I guess this is the most difficult part. It depends a lot on
| the exact place you are. It would be nice to know how much sand
| did he process and how much iron he got.
| augusto-moura wrote:
| Trace amounts of iron are present almost every where on the
| planet, most of it is bound to other elements though. You can
| easily find small "lines" of it in streams and river beds
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Yep, and this was the initial benefit of iron despite
| bronze generally being better - you can find it anywhere,
| vs needing to source both copper and tin which tended to
| come from different, far flung places.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| But the Bronze Age preceded the Iron Age...
| CydeWeys wrote:
| But iron won out in the end. It's harder to process, but
| the result is better.
| Lariscus wrote:
| Bronze has a lower melting point compared to Iron making
| it much easier to work with. I think you also have to
| invent charcoal first to reach the temperatures necessary
| to melt iron ore.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Seems like if there were enough metal in the soil to be this
| easy to retrieve, a larger mining interest would already be
| there. Then again, I know nothing of Queensland to know if it
| is protected against that kind of thing or not.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| "It's there" != "it's economical to extract commercially".
| And that != "it's _more_ economical to extract than other
| places ".
| 13of40 wrote:
| Just this summer I noticed that the magnets on the back of my
| barbecue thermometer were picking up a lot of magnetic sand
| from the local riverbank. I went back with a super-duper
| magnet-fishing magnet and found that probably 20% of the rocks
| there were magnetic. I've explored a little bit, and (mind
| blown) there are magnetic rocks all over the place, from cliff
| sides to rocks in my front yard to gravel from my friend's
| driveway. I haven't looked anywhere outside of Oregon and
| Washington though, but it seems like rocks with significant
| (presumably)-iron content aren't rare at all.
| selimnairb wrote:
| Never mind where he lives. Where does he get the time to do
| this amazing stuff?
| WJW wrote:
| Short answer: He has a youtube channel with 10m subscribers.
| jandrese wrote:
| He has over 10 million subscribers. He makes enough from
| YouTube that this can be a fulltime job.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| He bought a plot with everything he needs
| Narretz wrote:
| I think so. A few years ago, he moved his operation to a
| different spot of land because it had more / other resources he
| wanted.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| I love this channel and have been watching it for years, but one
| note of caution: this isn't the same type of primitive technology
| our ancestors used tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago. I
| would best describe it as "technology from scratch using all
| available modern knowledge".
|
| In a way it's even more interesting than trying to do primitive
| technology as it actually was. In this example, he's using modern
| knowledge of ore smelting and doing it in a way with the fewest
| tools/processes possible. Our ancestors (250,000 to ~3000 years
| go) _could_ have done this, but they didn 't. Metallurgy did not
| appear until a few thousand years ago and iron working working
| even later than bronze and other types of metal working. In fact,
| he's not even trying _that_ hard, as he doesn 't use the stream
| to build a waterwheel and automate many of his processes (though
| he did build a water hammer once).
|
| Really makes you think what's perfectly possible physically
| today, but we lack the knowledge to actually do it.
| [deleted]
| jon_adler wrote:
| Great video! I was wondering which country he was in when I heard
| the unmistakable screech of the cockatoo (or possibly a galah).
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It became a thing at my elementary school in the 80s to try and
| sell iron to hobby shops for cash, so kids were tearing out the
| big magnets from speakers and digging into the sandboxes at
| school to pull iron out of the sand.
|
| I never did it because I doubted you could really get money for a
| few ounces of iron and it looked pretty tedious to dig in a
| sandbox all day with a fist-sized magnet, and they were ruining
| speakers to do it. Who knew there was an even more tedious way to
| do this with clay and water?
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(page generated 2022-09-02 23:00 UTC)