text: Shingling There was still some slag left in the puddle balls, so while they were still hot they would be shingled to remove the remaining slag and cinder. That was achieved by forging the balls under a hammer, or by squeezing the bloom in a machine.  The material obtained at the end of shingling is known as bloom. The blooms are not useful in that form, so they were rolled into a final product.
  Sometimes European ironworks would skip the shingling process completely and roll the puddle balls. The only drawback to that is that the edges of the rough bars were not as well compressed. When the rough bar was reheated, the edges might separate and be lost into the furnace.
  Rolling
  The bloom was passed through rollers and to produce bars. The bars of wrought iron were of poor quality, called muck bars or puddle bars. To improve their quality, the bars were cut up, piled and tied together by wires, a process known as faggoting or piling. They were then reheated to a welding state, forge welded, and rolled again into bars. The process could be repeated several times to produce wrought iron of desired quality. Wrought iron that has been rolled multiple times is called merchant bar or merchant iron.