He didn't know exactly how much molten iron to pour onto how much wrought iron, so he could only try slowly.
He also didn't know how many times to heat and forge it, it was a matter of luck.
This piece of iron was repeatedly forged for a whole morning.
It looked very uneven in texture.
The forging continued in the afternoon.
He noticed that a certain edge was genuine steel.
So he stopped and polished that edge.
By the end of the afternoon, all the pig iron added to the furnace had been converted to wrought iron.
The wrought iron was very soft.
The furnace was stopped.
The piece of iron in Ma Lin's hand was ground into a blade one foot long, with the upper part being genuine steel and extremely sharp.
This degree of sharpness surprised everyone present.
He extracted his iron from clay using chemical methods.
His charcoal was made from good wood.
Thus, the steel he produced had very few impurities, requiring little effort to remove them.
