The Armour Archive

So I've been wanting to get my hands on a couple stakes, as in T stakes and other non-ball stakes. So I've been wondering, what's the process to making a functional hunk of useable metal?

What kind of steel should I use?
How should I treat it?
How should I harden it?

I think I can grasp the the concept of shaping it, I just don't know the process of making it a useable, useful piece of metal

well it depends on how you plan to use it. Light use mild steel will work; for more extensive use a medium carbon steel and heat treated is suggested. So car/truck axle, large rock breaker bar, jack hammer bit---rental centers will sometimes sell broken or worn out ones *cheap*, 1045, 4140 or 4340, 5160 alloys store boughten, old ag steel, RR and trolley rail... I like to walk through my local scrapyard till I find a piece where most of the work has already been done....

Note than when welding on medium to high carbon steels you need to preheat and let cool slowly to prevent HAZ cracking. For basic use, normalization will probably do fine; for top grade you may need to do a formal heat treat---but you need to know the alloy for that or test the material to find out how to heat treat it.

eBay, scrap yards and those in repair industry are also worth talking with for budget steel.
Tow bars, teeth from an excavator, and fork lift tines wear out and make great stakes.
Lathe ends/scrap/drops can also work.

If you have access to a band saw even heavy plate steel works.

Also consider things like a ring/necklace/bracelet mandrels, heavy wall pipe caps, and bearings.

What type of welder will you be using?
Grinding or cutting a bevel can help a lot.
Usually with an arc welder something like 6013 works well for the root pass.

I picked up a 50+ year old Lincoln "tombstone" welder for US$40 once and it will probably outlast me. They make almost every alloy known as rods and it's great for the heavier work like building stakes where MIG welders are often better for sheetmetal. However having a stick for tool building is a good idea. Every once in a while I see the AC/DC version being sold used for the price of the AC version and have not been lucky enough to be first on the phone---so far.

Another thing to look out for is odd shaped sledge heads, I've built a stake anvil using a RR spike driving sledge for top and another using an old drilling sledge head. (The 3rd stake anvil is still in progress with a shorter shaft but with a nice twist in the shaft)

I did what Thomas said with the railroad spike driving sledge. The nice thing about them is that they are hard and wear like iron (pun intended)

The RR spike driving sledges have two cylindrical ends of differing diameters. The new one I am working on we forged the driving head sledge to have a tapered rectangular cross section on one end---having friends with power hammers is *GREAT*!

All I've got is what I already said here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=180598&hilit=make+stake

Medium carbon is good if you're sure you've got a piece of it -- buy new steel or spark-test your candidate pieces. Low carbon of course welds easier, though you should also build about a quarter again as massive, up to a certain point: thick and heavy roundstock for a T stake doesn't need to be anything elaborate, mild roundstock being about all you'd need, and your weld-fabricating method would be to fill in a bevel: here's your round - O and here's your beveled piece of square or heavy bar stock at its end - /===. You can use two bevels if you like so they will come together like this: O<=== and you weld on both sides, filling in completely with multiple passes of weld.

Of the mediums, 4130 or 5160 are probably the easiest to come by. 1050 or 1060 simple steels are still around. Steel gets more delicate to work with as its carbon increases -- it is become less chemically stable and thus inclined to start burning instead of melting, at lower and lower temperature with increasing carbon content until finally only a few tens of degrees separate welding temperature from burning temperature. So, keep the carbon way low as in 1016 or such steel, and you can readily weld it up all the livelong day. Just fine for the shafts of the stakes as a rule.

Mild steel will ding up easier, but also just as easily can be filed smooth again. Med-carbon is just an optimized solution, for when you're actually ready and really need your stakes to be harder. Bending sheet metal, it's not so big of a deal.

This too may be relevant to your interest:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=180257&hilit=make+stake

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=180011&hilit=make+stake

We have a Search button here onsite, J. Hillard, and that button is your friend as much as it is mine.

I got a bucket full of free paving breaker bits from a big box hardware store, but I have heard you can get them from tool rental places as well. They are usually an air hardening steel and make decent hot cuts, punches and drifts and such. I am not sure what their weldability is, but one of them I am going to heat and put a bend and shoulder in to use as a bick in my vise or a stake holder.

Over at iforgeiron we had a member who's career was repointing jackhammer bits. Of the more than a million he did; he said only a handful were anything other than a 1050.

There are a lot of "junkyard lists" out there that claim they are S7, I believe this is due to the alloy listing in Machinerys Handbook which stated that S7 would make great jackhammer bits---it would. Solid gold makes great fry pans and Titanium makes great car bodies---why do we not all have those? *Cost*; if a cheaper material will work, even if not quite as well, it will tend to be the one used.

Ok found the quote I was hunting for:
"Having been a manufacturer of paving breaker bits, I can tell you that no one uses S-7 or any real tool steel ( at least not in 1", 1-1/8, 1-1/4). I've had just about every one spectrographed. B&L is a modified 1045, Vulcan used to use 1078 but now uses 15B30, Pioneer/DelSteel is 1078 or 9260 for their "alloy" bits. Apex (my old brand) are 8630. These things sell new (at full discount) for about what tool steel costs per pound. Everybody is looking for the cheapest thing that will do the job. People expect these bits to be really great stuff, perception trumps reality every time. jackhammer bits are hollow, pavement breaker bits are solid"

The best information I was able to dig up is that most of them are something like 1040 now and not s7 if they ever were at all. Should be fine for some applications but you wouldn't want to use them to make something that has to hold an edge.

my quote was from Grant Sarver in 2009

Back in the dark ages we found a lot of good stuff at Rakow Machinery - they are out in Germantown WI. used to drive out there and find all sorts of cool stuff. Things may easily have changed in 30+ years, but it is worth a try.

Wade