Making your own steel from scratch is exciting. We spent two months on smelting bloomery steel and folding it into billets. Many things need to be perfected for making steel that suitable for a cutting blade. The furnace construction, the air pressure, the temperature, the operating time, etc. have to be right without any accurate  measuring instrument. We learned how hard the ancient craftsmen worked back in their time just for a bar of high carbon steel and how that difficulty affected the craft. The project is still ongoing.