I scooped more charcoal into the top of the bloomery, then stepped back from the heat. Ibriya was working the bellows, but once it was topped off, I switched in. We had been at it all morning, same as the last few attempts, and were both hoping for a win.The first iteration of the bloomery didn’t use bellows. I had thought that the passive draw of air through the stack would be enough, but with the limited height and the quality of peat charcoal, it failed to produce slag. Perhaps if we built it taller, passive air flow would be sufficient even without good hardwood charcoal, but height meant instability and additional challenges with loading it. Also, if the iron bloom got stuck, we would have to tear it down, so it was better to build something smaller if we could make it work.Our redesign was around the same height, but incorporated the bellows, which worked… until the clay pipe connecting the bellows to the bloomery cracked and fell apart from the heat differential. A little deep meditation later, and I dredged up an Argadian memory that led us to building a bloomey with a rudimentary tuyere, into which we seated the outlet from the bellows, and sealed with wet clay. That gave us a controlled weak point which we could keep cool with water and bandage with more wet clay as we worked.Then it was just a matter of dialing in the timing, ratios of fuel and iron, and other important but minor details. The large chunks of pressed peat charcoal were great for the forge, but they created large gaps inside the bloomery and uneven heat. They needed to be broken down into smaller pieces, but that meant we could just use regular dried cut turf to make a finer charcoal, which saved us some labor.Unfortunately, there was only so much previously cut and dried turf. Ibriya and I put in a bunch of extra shifts to cut more peat for the village in order to replace older stacked turf that we were able to get donated to our project, but that had a limit, (...)