The Undesired Second Chance

Chapter 19: Electromagnetic

By now summer was well and truly underway, and the uncomfortable heat was a constant reminder that this country he had found himself in was called 'The Land of Fire' for good reason.

Axel—stuck working around a forge for at least several hours every week—was really regretting his career choice at the moment.

It had been a month now since he had gotten that first lesson with Pei, and during that time he had gone to him for any other questions he stumbled across while working. Of course, actually asking the questions proved to be a little tricky, given his still-limited vocabulary. He had to try, though, since the whole process of making a true katana or tanto or any other such blade was a bit more involved than for making a European longsword.

For one thing, he couldn't just purchase a bar of steel of a specific grade and hammer it into shape. There was this whole process of choosing bits of metal with the appropriate carbon content—though Pei didn't know that that was what he was technically doing—heating them, and hammering them down to weld the pieces together. Then hammering and folding the metal to remove even more impurities, hammering and folding, and only then would the metal be ready to be shaped into a weapon.

It was fascinating to watch a master at work, how he timed every action carefully based on color and sheen and sheer experience whereas Axel had been leaning on his knowledge of the metallurgy behind it all to reach similar—if a little more amateurish—results.

Still, he mused to himself, the raw materials left quite a bit to be desired.

Getting solid metal was expensive, and even then it was still basically a mishmash of steels with different carbon concentrations. Morimoto had helped with that tremendously, having made use of his connections to set up the store with a small stock before he went back to Chotto, but that would only go so far.

As such, Axel had been making use of a lot of recycled metal—mostly scavenged kunai and the like from the training fields. But that, too, wouldn't work forever.

Which was why he had begun looking into producing his own metal.

So he had purchased a bin of iron sand to experiment with.

And, as expected, there's a lot of crap mixed into iron sand. Sand is sand after all, and, though the magnetite itself has very few impurities, the overall mix contains all sorts of other minerals and undesirable stuff.

The current process to un-blend this mess of sediments involves using what amounts to large-scale gold panning techniques and flowing water to sift the heavier metal from the rest. Followed, naturally, by repeating the process a large number of times.

It was, to be frank, more effort than he was willing to deal with regularly. Especially since he had another system in mind.

He just needed to figure out where he could get a magnet.

For now, though, he was sketching out the rest of his temporary set-up. Two rollers, a conveyor belt to run over them, a funnel he could pour the iron sand through onto the track, and a pair of jars or something to catch the runoff—tests would show if he needed anything else. The system would work by having one of those rollers be magnetic, or have a magnet inside, so the non-magnetic stuff would fall off the track straight away while the iron would stick a little longer and fall off a little later.

Simple.

If he had a magnet. Or means to create an electromagnet.

Axel was capable of making a coil and an iron bar—that would be easy—the problem was getting an electric current; he had no clue how to go about getting batteries or whatever. The house has lights and appliances, but he hadn't actually seen any stores selling electrical components or the like.