Cool Experiment ! I wish you great success in your further tests.

Very interesting! Thanks!

You also need at least 5% Vanadium. It is Essential.

Se pitää takoa alle 800 celsius asteessa , pimeässä pajassa se onnistuu helpoiten , eli jos " varjo " poistuu niin silloin on liian kuuma , " varjoa " ei näe valoisassa pajassa .

I mean, if you want to isolate an issue to try different alloying %’s, couldn’t you mix modern steels avaliable (and the alloying elements you _do_ have) to get approximately correct amounts? Looking forward to more stuff on crucible steels!

What type of magnesium do you need Doc I live about 1 1/2 hours from 41° south formally TEMCO they make silico and fero manganese. Not sure if that’s what your looking for🙂

Doc, how did you get the billets out of your crucibles? Did you have to break the crucible(s), or did the billets fall out once cooled? What you are experimenting with is fascinating and one step further in "the process" of making steel(s) than what my local Blacksmith group is planning for next Saturday (03 Sep 2022). We plan to attempt making an iron bloom in a furnace, then splitting the bloom into ~4 pieces so ~4 smaller groups of Smiths can hammer them into wrought iron right then & there (as a demonstration at the "Barberville Pioneer Settlement" in Barberville, Florida (USA). As far as I know, only the "Lead Demonstrator" has done it before (out of our group), so I hope that he won't be herding cats ... I mean Blacksmiths ... all day to hopefully obtain some real wrought iron. I don't recall what the plans are for the wrought iron we'll (hopefully) make. If I understood your question about something you hadn't experienced at that "low of a temperature" (I think that's what you said), perhaps the sparks you saw were slag and/or other impurities being hammered out of the billet? (Or was it just flakes of the cracking billet shooting out of cracks?) Lastly, did everything in your machine shop survive the earlier flood?