Doin’ It with Sean: Medieval Bell Brazing

Hello, and welcome to “Doin’ It: with Sean” Medieval Bell Brazing and today, we’re gonna be going over the process of taking your old boring Medieval Iron Bell and jazzing it up a bit by adding a splash of color, of course, I’m talking about Brazing. A braze is a kind of welding done by joining two pieces of metal with a third piece that has a lower melting point. In this case, it was iron being joined to iron using a copper alloy (bronze).

If you want to braze an Iron Bell, you will need…

Iron Bell, (or sheet Iron to fold into a bell.)

Bronze, make sure it is in bite-size pieces
Imitation Early Medieval Bronze Ingots

Furnace (any old hole in the ground will work but the better your furnace the easier this will be)

Clay

Cloth
Charcoal (like 100 of pounds of charcoal)
Time / Patience

FIVE EASY STEPS

Take your bell, place the bronze on the bell and wrapped with a cloth.
Pack inclusion rich clay around that (you now have a bell package, yay).
From my thesis
Let dry.
Heat up the furnace and carefully place the package into the furnace so it is sitting in the right spot (the right spot depends heavily on the kind of furnace that you are using). you let it sit in the heat so that the internal temperature rises without the clay turning to glass and melting, It can turn to glass but the melting part is problematic. Let’s try to keep the temperature somewhere around 1000 C, we want the bronze to melt but not the clay, and we should have nice liquid bronze once the internal temperature reaches 1000 so that’s the goal, get the internal temperature to 1000.
Take out your glowing 1000+ degree package and toss it around on the ground, sloshing the liquid bronze around and coating the bell. Then feel free to place it in water and leave until it stops spitting boiling water at you. Remove the package and break it open, to reveal your beautiful new brazed bell. Yay, you did it!