THE SLOSS 2009 IRON POUR

 

Iron! The guy who has the word "sausage" on his back has tapped open the stopped-up hole in Fe Faru! The crowd goes nuts at the first sight of the metal and they all scream and whoop and yell 'IRON!'

After the furnace starts to drip hot iron like that it is "stopped off" with a mixture of what appeared to be clay, sand and water. You can see it on the end of the pole here:
Those sparks you see? They go everywhere when someone screws up. Hot iron dislikes anything around it that isn't the same temperature as... say... hot iron. Keep that in mind.

 

 
So after a certain amount of time passes, the stopped-up hole is chiseled open by a very brave artist who doesn't necessarily care about the safety of his feet or shins and you end up with what you see above: a stream of VERY hot liquid metal pissing itself out of a spout. It lands in a ladle that is treated on the interior to hold the iron without dissolving. The ladle has two 6-foot poles on either side of it for a couple of other very brave souls to carry it to the molds...

The molds are created by the students and participants and are lined up. You are seeing mostly sandstone, which handles iron pretty well depending on the temperatures involved.

The next series of shots are intended to give you an idea of what it is like to stand next to the ladle and watch as liquid iron is being poured into a mold...

If you don't think that what you are seeing is one of the most amazing things you have ever seen, then your priorities are way out of whack. Hot metal goes in. Fire comes out, and several hours later an artist has a cast-iron representation of whatever he had carved inside those two blocks and strapped together with wire. Just incredible.
 

This process goes on and on all day, until each mold is filled. It becomes somewhat mechanical: Tap open the furnace... catch the iron in a ladle... skim the rapidly-cooling stuff off the top of the ladle... ... stop up the flow of iron form the furnace... walk it to the mold... pour... keep going 'till the ladle is empty...

The problem with repetition is that it gets... well... repetitive. Also, consider that you are dealing with hundreds of pounds of hot, unstable metal. AND you are wearing heavy, heat-resistant gear to protect yourself. Something is bound to go wrong...

I want to go back to this photo, which is actually taken at the moment when something had gone wrong in a kind of big way. that is why you are seeing the sparks all over the place. They are happening because a student had incorrectly attempted to stop-up the spout and had ended up sending iron all over the place, including the ground.

Turn on the bathtub faucet and let water run out of it for a second. Then take a washcloth and shove it against the spout and try to stop the water from coming out. Now pretend that what you have all over yourself is LIQUID IRON.

That's what happened.
 

 
This girl (I never got her name) was up for her turn at stopping up the flow...

She didn't get it right, and it caused a major episode of "Oh shit! Liquid metal everywhere!"

Not a good thing. It resulted in a tense few moments for everyone involved. It also sent her to the hospital. I'm not going to show you the photos of that, but here is a couple of some folks' reactions to the girl getting trucked away in an ambulance...

 

But here's the thing: THE IRON DOESN'T STOP COMING JUST BECAUSE SOMEONE IS IN TROUBLE. So after a moment or two of composure (and a very harshly-worded warning to the rest of the participants by a very-unhappy Carl), the pour went on...

 
 
 
NEXT PAGE: REACTION MOLDS...