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Shaping metal with a hammer is the archetypical component of smithing. Often the hammering is done while the metal is hot, having been heated in a forge . Smithing can also involve the other aspects of metalworking , such as refining metals from their ores (traditionally done by smelting ), casting it into shapes ( founding ), and filing to ...
Smelting is a process of applying heat and a chemical reducing agent to an ore to extract a desired base metal product. [1] It is a form of extractive metallurgy that is used to obtain many metals such as iron , copper , silver , tin , lead and zinc .
Converting is a type of metallurgical smelting that includes several processes; the most commercially important form is the treatment of molten metal sulfides to produce crude metal and slag, as in the case of copper and nickel converting. A now-uncommon form is batch treatment of pig iron to produce steel by the Bessemer process.
In metallurgy, refining consists of purifying an impure metal. It is to be distinguished from other processes such as smelting and calcining in that those two involve a chemical change to the raw material, whereas in refining the final material is chemically identical to the raw material. Refining thus increases the purity of the raw material ...
The "black" in "blacksmith" refers to the black firescale [citation needed], a layer of oxides that forms on the surface of the metal during heating.The origin of smith is the Old English word smið meaning "blacksmith", originating from the Proto-Germanic *smiþaz meaning "skilled worker".
A red-hot metal workpiece is inserted into a forging press. Plastic deformation involves using heat or pressure to make a workpiece more conductive to mechanical force. Historically, this and casting were done by blacksmiths, though today the process has been industrialized. In bulk metal forming, the workpiece is generally heated up. Cold ...
Blast furnaces are currently rarely used in copper smelting, but modern lead smelting blast furnaces are much shorter than iron blast furnaces and are rectangular in shape. [76] Modern lead blast furnaces are constructed using water-cooled steel or copper jackets for the walls, and have no refractory linings in the side walls. [ 77 ]
16th century cupellation furnaces (per Agricola). Cupellation is a refining process in metallurgy in which ores or alloyed metals are treated under very high temperatures and subjected to controlled operations to separate noble metals, like gold and silver, from base metals, like lead, copper, zinc, arsenic, antimony, or bismuth, present in the ore.