Getting started
The straight cast pipe that three siex recipes and the converter's third build stage all need has no recipe in Iron Industry Expanded, so the hot-blast plant and the converter are creative-only. Everything else below works.
This page is the order to build things in. Each stage says what it is for and links to the page that carries the numbers.
Before you start: the iron tier
siex is the top of a chain, not the start of one. Iron Industry Expanded has to be running first and has to have got you to molten pig iron: a cold blast furnace, the burdenmaker that makes burden out of ore and flux, a coke oven, molten canals to carry metal, and plated and cast pipe to carry gas. The hot furnace in this mod is the same machine as that cold one with a different top on it, so every habit from the iron tier carries over.
Stage one: steam in the high band
The blast that this tier needs is beyond what a hand blower or a water wheel can push, so the steam plant comes first.
A Lancashire Boiler holds 1200 litres, boils between 200 and 800 litres of water and makes 48 litres of steam a second, up to 12 atm. It needs a vent for its exhaust, and it explodes with a four-block radius if it is left over pressure with nowhere to push.
A Cornish Engine takes that steam and drives one sub-machine. Its throttle has three settings and moves everything at once:
| Throttle | Engages at | Steam drawn | Power |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low | 5 atm | 8 L/s | 0.2 |
| Normal | 6 atm | 16 L/s | 0.4 |
| High | 7 atm | 32 L/s | 0.8 |
Above 8 atm at the inlet the engine wears toward breaking at any setting.
An Air Blower on the engine is the blast source. It injects 144 litres of air a second per unit of engine power, at the engine's inlet steam pressure times 0.75. That is the number the rest of the mod is gated on: air counts as blast at 2.5 atm, so the engine's steam has to stay above 3.4 atm.
Stage two: the furnace
Build the hot furnace around a Blast Furnace Core. It is a nine-course tower of tier 3 refractory brick, and only tier 3: a wall of anything else will not complete it.
Charge it through the pair on top. A Reinforced Hopper is the tank, holding 48 units of one material at a time; the Bell Hopper underneath buffers another 48 and drips 4 units a second into the shaft. Alternate loads of burden and coke.
Get the blast running before lighting it, then light it with a torch through an open tap. The whole model, including how much air the burden demands, is on Ironmaking in the hot blast furnace.
Stage three: hot blast
A furnace on cold blast runs about 60 C short of melting iron, so this stage is not optional.
Build two stoves, each anchored on a Cowper Stove Intake with four Heat Sink blocks up its middle, and one chimney on a Smoke Stack Intake. Pipe the furnace's exhaust into the stoves, their spent exhaust onward to the stack, the air main into their upper passthroughs, and their upper outlets to the tuyeres.
Then work them in turn: one charging on exhaust while the other blows air at the furnace, swapped by hand on valves. Put a relief line to the stack behind a pressure valve before the first swap, or the furnace chokes. Hot blast has the rates and the failure modes.
With a charged stove on the tuyeres the furnace melts, and molten pig iron runs out of the iron tap into a canal.
Stage four: steel
Build the converter around a Bessemer Control, with a Bessemer Transmission under it for the axle and a Bessemer Gas Intake for the blast. Right-click the control with a large gear and eight rods to spawn the Bessemer Converter vessel, then raise the vessel through its seven build stages.
Run pig iron into it down a canal, stand it upright, and let the blast blow the carbon out. Five minutes later it is steel. Twelve seconds after that it is soft iron instead, so watch the readout on the vessel. The Bessemer process explains the whole heat.
Stage five: what the steel is for
Pour the finished heat down a canal and cast it. Bessemer steel cannot be forged on an anvil; molds are the route, and a tool mold filled with it gives a Bessemer steel tool, which is a vanilla steel tool with a little more durability.
The stock forms exist in creative and melt back cleanly, but nothing makes them and nothing asks for them, and the rolling mill and shear that would work them are the iron tier's own gap.