Making Bronze Tools

Sadly although the Amazon Rainforest was certainly rich in many resources and minerals, two things it lacked were tree sap and bees, more specifically the wax that could be made using their honey, with one being located way too far away even to consider a possibility, and the other being an ocean away.

Regardless I was unwilling to give up, so I began thinking of material that could temporarily take shape and then burn really easily into liquid form, at first trying to use berry 'meat' to put it that way, no longer being able to find anything that I could put together that would hold for long enough and still easily melt though, I began to give up.

It was then that I suddenly thought if instead of looking for something that could take shape temporarily and then melt, I looked for something that normally held a solid shape but then melted into liquid when put under enough heat.

Thanks to this change of perspective, I suddenly looked for fruits nearby that could be used. Yet, I found that they either burnt instead of melting like potatoes or were too creamy like avocadoes (which I brought back to the settlement), bananas, oranges, etc.

Eventually, though, I encountered a coconut tree and collected them since I was pretty sure that I was covered on the orange seed front. And as mentioned before, I had already taken some avocadoes before.

Regardless what mattered was that I decided to try one of the coconuts since I had surprisingly never actually consumed one, at least not directly from the coconut, that is. And it was once I opened the coconut and saw the coconut meat, I suddenly had the idea to try and use it to form the mold.

I couldn't try it out though, as the draft furnace wasn't ready yet. Unfortunately, neither was the charcoal, meaning that I would be forced to just wait until tomorrow before making any progress, not that I would be losing out on much. So, as it was already 5 pm anyway, after making sure to up the Cob draft furnace layers somewhere the rain would not interfere with it, I set back to the original settlement.

May 10th, 0001:

Same as yesterday, as soon as I made sure that all of the farms were not encountering any problems and killing some pests, I once again made my way back to the new settlement bulling out all four of the draft furnace layers and bringing them next to the river as that was one of the places with the strongest natural wind.

I then grabbed a new coconut and carved the shape of both a small hammer and chisel before surrounding both of them with Cob individually until I was left with two Cob balls. Afterward, grabbing one-fourth of the now finished and ready to use charcoal, putting it in the entire base of the draft furnace.

From there, I just built up the other three layers of the draft furnace before using some more freshly made Cob to fill in the gaps formed in between the separate layers. Afterward, I put the two cob molds inside before starting a fire and throwing it into the charcoal I had put there, causing it to all begin to burn.

Then, I began to use the bellow to increase the amount of air coming in from the small entrance at the base and looking at my stopwatch so that I could check on it and make sure that the Cob hadn't craked after being ready.

As for when I would know if the coconut meat had liquified under the extreme heat, I was just constantly looking out for the sound of hissing (of course, I did know that it was not guaranteed for this to happen, but it was certainly a sign if it did).

After five minutes, it seemed that the cob had hardened enough and that it was probably best to simply remove it from the fire before it could begin to crack. As for how I knew this, it was because I was taking it out from the furnace by using sticks (I still needed to cook a Cob pot as well), and the pot did not move at all when pressure was applied on all sides appeared to be entirely solid.

I then did the same thing with a Cob cup afterward, turning off the now a lot more solid draft furnace and waiting about an hour for the cup to cool enough to be usable. Afterward, extinguishing the fire with water before I grabbed another fourth of the charcoal I had and put half of it in a pretty wide and flat wooden box before curing it, which was then also filled with crushed copper ore.

The reason was that since bronze was a mixture of melted tin and copper, meaning that I first had to extract those from the ore by crushing the ore and then collecting the small fragments that remained after they were burned together.

Thankfully though, now that I had used a draft furnace once, it was easier the second time, with the only time-consuming part being separating the chunks of copper from the ash and charcoal that remained. Of course, also having to repeat the process to get my hands on tin.

So, once I had both ores, I simply put them together in the cup I had made beforehand and using the last remaining one-fourth of the coal (another one fourth was used getting the tin ore) and continued to let the fire burn until the contents inside the cup were glowing at which point I used the Y-shaped part of the branches to bring it out and pour the liquid bronze in the hole on top of the two molds I had prepared.

As soon as I had the molten bronze fill up both molds, I put the cup down by the riverside, followed by a lout craking sound that startled me. Then I threw the sticks into the river because they were on fire. Once that was done though, all that was left was just to wait for the copper to cool down naturally and see whether or not I had succeeded.