You would think this would be a dangerous activity but it turns out to be petty tame. About 1/20 kids burns a finger, and when they finish yelling they inevitably tough up and get back to work because they are having so much fun.
So anyway, scrounge up plumbing torch and some nails and let the kids make "mini-swords." You can use a sledge hammer or any big chunk of metal as your anvil.
If you want to see what the "swords" look like my kid has pictures on his site: https://lemonsword.com/
800,000 nails × 3 minutes = 2.4 million minutes = 40,000 hours = 20 Years of labor
That would bring it down to only ~7 years of labor if we call it 1 min per nail, assuming that you're already working from prepared bar stock. Still a significant expenditure of skilled labor!
As I understand it, nail making was largely unchanged from the Roman era. One would have to adjust for work hours which differed in the past than today for those, but it like it would take someone 2 years to produce that number working modern hours, though likely less than 1 in the era they were produced.
[1] https://www.mortiseandtenonmag.com/blogs/blog/issue-15-t-o-c...
[2] https://www.bournheath-pc.gov.uk/about-bournheath/bournheath...
[3] https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/chapter-1-of-the-di...
Quick google suggests iron was 1/300 the value of silver in the Roman empire, so if we say $40/oz, that makes an oz of iron = $0.13.
a 10-penny nail is about 0.2oz, so $0.026/nail.
$0.026 + 0.004 = $0.03/nail.
If I go to home depot, 1lb / ~80 10-penny nails would cost me $9, or $0.11.
So, astoundingly, it was cheaper in the Roman empire to buy nails(??). That doesn't seem right... Modern nails are different material (galvanized / zinc coated), but still.
I can't find the price of nails in roman times, but 300 years ago it was around a buck a nail.
https://www.nber.org/digest/202203/tracking-price-nails-1695
I would use the salary for a day labor instead. Like if I spend my salary for a day on just nails, vs how many nails a smith could make for the same number of working hours.
Nzen•6h ago
If this interests you, I recommend Bret Devereaux's five part series about medieval iron production and use, https://acoup.blog/2020/10/02/collections-iron-how-did-they-...