What was the productivity of forging?

by tsayper

I wander how long did it take to forge farm tools, weapons etc from iron?

Also, I have found quite a lot info on iron smelting in a bloomery, but not much on the forging of the resulting "bloom" piece of metal. How long did it take to make an iron billet from a bloom?

wotan_weevil

Lee Sauder and Skip Williams, "A practical treatise on the smelting and smithing of bloomery iron", Historical Metallurgy 36(2), 122–131 (2002) (available online here) gives some useful data on the time taken to turn a bloom into a consolidated billet, and to turn that billet into convenient sale-sized iron bars. They started with a 13.5kg bloom, split it into 2, and used a 7.7kg piece to produce a 5kg iron billet. Total time is given as 11 man-hours This was for a 3 person team; this doesn't count the time that would be used to operate human-powered bellows, which might raise the total to 15 man-hours. A further 3 man-hours were required to produce 0.5kg bars, per bar.

Experienced workers would be able to produce the billet and bars more quickly; these experimental times by non-experts can be taken as an upper bound for the time that an expert would take.

Overall, they estimate 23 hours of labour per kg of finished iron bars (0.5kg bars). This time can be divided as hours per finished kg as:

Mining ore, making charcoal: 10

Smelting: 3.3

Making the billet from the bloom: 3.8

Making bars: 6

To produce 10 bars of 0.5kg each, this is a total of 115 hours. Removing the time for mining and charcoal-making, and only considering the time for smelting and turning the bloom in billets and bars, leaves 65 hours. Since this was for a 3 person team, this is approximately 22 hours per person.

How long does it take a blacksmith to turn this into tools? This depends a lot on the tool: its complexity, its size, and the level of finish. If a lot of grinding and polishing is required, the time can increase a lot (as an extreme example, the polishing of a Japanese sword blade can take a few weeks).

Data is available for the productivity of professional blacksmiths working with traditional equipment. For example, Kengne Signe Elie B., et al., "Local blacksmiths’s activity in the west region of Cameroon and their contribution to the development of micro hydroelectric power plants in that region", Afr. J. Environ. Sci. Technol. 9(5), 428-437 (2015), https://doi.org/10.5897/AJEST2014.1798 gives some times for the forging of common tools:

Hoe: 1-2 hours

Axe: 6-8 hours

Kitchen knife: 1/2 hour

Cooking pot: 3 hours

Traditional blacksmithing in sub-Saharan Africa typically involves at least 2 workers: 1 smith, and 1 assistant to operate the bellows.

Since it isn't as easy to find details on things like consolidating blooms into billets, compared with forging tools etc., you might be interested in http://www.haraldthesmith.com/iron-smelting-part-viii-bloom-forging/ which presents some photos and description of the process. The author's MSc thesis, The Ironworker's Craft, University College Dublin, 2017, should also be of interest: https://www.academia.edu/35391279/The_Ironworkers_Craft_MSc_Thesis_