Process
In the finery, a workman known as the "finer" remelted pig iron so as to oxidise the carbon (and silicon). This produced a lump of iron (with some slag) known as a bloom. This was consolidated using a water-powered hammer (see trip hammer) and returned to the finery.
The next stages were undertaken by the "hammerman", who in some iron-making areas such as South Yorkshire was also known as the "stringsmith", heating his iron in a string-furnace. Because the bloom is highly porous, and its open spaces are full of slag, the hammerman's or stringsmith's tasks were to beat the heated bloom with a hammer to drive the molten slag out of it, and then to draw the bloom out into a bar to produce what was known as bar iron. In order to do this, he had to reheat the iron, for which he used the chafery. The fuel in the finery had to be charcoal, because impurities in any mineral fuel would affect the quality of the iron.
Read more about this topic: Finery Forge
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