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Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

Does this guy lives in the perfect spot to do these things? Making clay seems to be easy. Large quantities of metals in the ground. Never cold, plenty of wood everywhere.

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> Never cold, plenty of wood everywhere.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology

> Primitive Technology is a YouTube channel run by John Plant. Based in [Far North Queensland] in the Australian state of Queensland,

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_North_Queensland

> Far North Queensland has a tropical climate and as such, the name Tropical North Queensland is sometimes used to refer to the region, mostly due to the tourism industry.

> Making clay seems to be easy.

I agree. [At least the rivers I know have plenty of clay.]

> Large quantities of metals in the ground.

I guess this is the most difficult part. It depends a lot on the exact place you are. It would be nice to know how much sand did he process and how much iron he got.

Trace amounts of iron are present almost every where on the planet, most of it is bound to other elements though. You can easily find small "lines" of it in streams and river beds

Yep, and this was the initial benefit of iron despite bronze generally being better - you can find it anywhere, vs needing to source both copper and tin which tended to come from different, far flung places.

But the Bronze Age preceded the Iron Age...

But iron won out in the end. It's harder to process, but the result is better.

Bronze has a lower melting point compared to Iron making it much easier to work with. I think you also have to invent charcoal first to reach the temperatures necessary to melt iron ore.

Iron was originally produced without melting it at all. Instead, iron ore was reacted with reduced gases, and a flux (limestone) causes the silicate contaminants to melt instead. The solid iron that's obtained (sponge iron) is then forged into shape (and also beaten to remove residual silicates.)

I googled it, and apparently we still do that, at least for some of the production.

Yes, direct reduced iron (DRI). We may be moving back to it, too, when we move to green hydrogen as the reducing agent.

Seems like if there were enough metal in the soil to be this easy to retrieve, a larger mining interest would already be there. Then again, I know nothing of Queensland to know if it is protected against that kind of thing or not.

"It's there" != "it's economical to extract commercially". And that != "it's more economical to extract than other places".

He used to live in the city in Australia and go out to a piece of property owned by a friend, based on the amount of money that he's made from his channel though I think he now bought a property just to do this. He was a lawn maintenance guy if I remember correctly.

Just this summer I noticed that the magnets on the back of my barbecue thermometer were picking up a lot of magnetic sand from the local riverbank. I went back with a super-duper magnet-fishing magnet and found that probably 20% of the rocks there were magnetic. I've explored a little bit, and (mind blown) there are magnetic rocks all over the place, from cliff sides to rocks in my front yard to gravel from my friend's driveway. I haven't looked anywhere outside of Oregon and Washington though, but it seems like rocks with significant (presumably)-iron content aren't rare at all.

Iron is 1000 times more abundant in the crust than copper.

I think so. A few years ago, he moved his operation to a different spot of land because it had more / other resources he wanted.

He bought a plot with everything he needs

Never mind where he lives. Where does he get the time to do this amazing stuff?

Short answer: He has a youtube channel with 10m subscribers.

He has over 10 million subscribers. He makes enough from YouTube that this can be a fulltime job.

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