Alison:
> (Roman saw stock couldn't be made en masse in rolling
> mills, either, but had to be forged.) Until this
> sawtooth ensemble was developed, axes remained the
> best way to fell a tree, and splitting and then adzing
> the surface the best way to make a plank.
Sort of - already some 14th century ships had sawed planks. Probably because cheaper wood could be used that way (not all trees split as conveniently as oaks).
> Now, it turns out that the real reason that forests
> quickly needed stewards to protect them in the Middle
> Ages was the need for wood in iron smelting. One
> furnace (usually located in the forest) needed 25m3 of
> wood, in the form of charcoal, to turn 200kg of iron
> ore into 50kg of iron. It was estimated that a
> furnace running for 40 days could consume a 1km radius
> of forest as fuel. (Quick example of a wood shortage:
> in 13thC Douai (northern France), poorer families had
> to rent a wooden coffin, which was reclaimed by the
> undertaker after the ceremony was over.)
Most of this was used for refining raw metal from the ore. Both real world copper and tin require less reductive agents, and the raw metal is a lot easier to work because you can melt it out.
IMO Gloranthan "bronze" has that lower melting point - which makes the bronze equipment more susceptible for fire attacks.
I do think that it can be tempered and hardened only through the same hammering you need for iron implements, and that master smiths produce damascened bronze from layers of softer and harder alloy.
Dragon Pass isn't really in danger of deforestation for refining ores, though - most of the bronze is mined as nuggets from shattered bones. While the surrounding patina/rust is high quality ore which will be refined by specialists, too, a good portion of the metal can be melted out by the village smith (who might sell the ore to a stickpicker trader).
Note that charcoal probably will be made from collected breakoffs rather than felled trees. Lumber gathering rights are ok for stickpickers, but tree-felling? Better to harvest what the Storms offer.
> Getting back to Glorantha, since bronze is assumed in
> many cases to be available as a native metal, this
> shouldn't be such a problem. What the trade-off is in
> needing to heat bronze to melting point for many
> applications, vs ductile point for RW iron, I'll leave
> for others to check out. Bring on the Rubber Bible!
As I said above, IMG it can be cast for poor quality (real world) bronze implements, or tempered and hammered for a better quality. White embers probably would melt the item on the surface even with only short exposure, so IMG the bellows are used only for a bright orange glow.
> However, with the huge consumption of wood that
> smelting can take, I think that for Sartar and
> Heortland to remain well-forested, there's not as much
> forging going on as one might think. Or the dwarves
> are doing much of it with their secret coal technology
> (early 13thC in Britain). Or maybe Heat Metal spells
> are saving the forests of Sartar.
Melting takes a lot less fuel than refining.
Question: does Ernalda provide high temperature pottery suitable for melting bronze (or lesser metals and alloys like (real world) brass, tin, pewter, lead, but also silver and gold and alloys thereof) in? Or do Gloranthan melters use clay forms which are heated in a kiln, and for the casting the funnel tip is hammered off after the form has been placed over the models?
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