If there is a thread already showing this please guide me to it. Since I am just starting to work on personal hardware I can use a lot of help. What types of steel are usable for forging whether cold or hot? Also, what is to be avoided? I remember hammering out a piece of rolled steel from the scrap pile at work into a knife blade, but could never get over about 35 Rockwell when tempering. After asking the maintenance crew, they said it probably had too much lead in it. Things like this I would like to avoid.
I would like to thank all who have answered my novice questions and all the help reading your othe r post have given me.
Thanks, Gene
Usable steel
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Sagebowman
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Padrig
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http://www.brighthelm.org/armour/Basic-Armouring.pdf
Should get you past most beginner type questions.
Pad
Should get you past most beginner type questions.
Pad
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Padrig
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Oups sorry, didnt see the forging part. 
This is where you should get more answers:
http://www.anvilfire.com/
Pad
This is where you should get more answers:
http://www.anvilfire.com/
Pad
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Konstantin the Red
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Sage, I wouldn't go to those maintenance guys for any more advice on steel types. "Lead in it" -- Jayzus. With their wildly different melting points, iron and lead don't alloy.
Steels that are not in a hardened state (lots of the type of microcrystal named martensite, and this is the stuff that makes hardened steel hard: it's not a chemical difference, but how the atoms are ordered in the crystalline structure -- analogous to the structural difference between graphite and diamond) can be cold-worked or hot-worked. Cold-working produces workhardening, which requires the metal to be annealed if coldworking is to continue without causing cracks in the steel.
You were hammering on mild steel, and the hardening you experienced was work-hardening. Mild steel is our civilization's answer to wrought iron. It has a carbon content of less than two-tenths of one percent by weight, and it's easily formed, easily cut, easily welded, easily polished. In a word, mild-mannered.
The opposite extreme is tool steel: close to one percent of carbon, and kept at full hardness. This is great for cutting other pieces of steel of more ordinary hardnesses, but it's also so brittle that tool steel cutters are actually obtuse-angled. You could smash the things hitting them with a hammer, so whacking tool-steel cutters isn't done.
In between, but leaning towards the tool steel, are the steels with enough carbon content to be hardenable by heat treating. They are workable enough at bright red heat, most of them. High carbon stainless alloys exist also, and make rugged knife blades but come out a tad too brittle to be completely satisfactory as sword blades, for which the simplest carbon steels and low-alloy steels like 5160, which is an almost-simple steel, are best. Bar-stock steels in 1070, 1085, 1090 or 1095 are among the best of steels for long blades. A 10xx steel is a plain-jane carbon steel, and the last two digits of the four gives the carbon content in hundredths of a percent, called "points of carbon" in the trade. Seventy points of carbon = 0.70% C; mild steels have twenty points, eighteen, or fifteen. High-carbon is trickier to weld, because as C increases, the temperature at which the steel starts to burn gets closer to its welding temp -- burnt steel is useless. This is where shield-gas welding rigs like MIG welders with all the bells and whistles really shine. High carbon is also trickier to cold-work, because it workhardens a lot faster.
Scrapyard sources for high-carbon steels are things like jackhammer bits, torsion bars, crowbars and old files. Auto springs are rather dubious, because they are so often a manganese steel and are notoriously "red short" which means if you hammer them at anything below orange heat they crumble into something that looks like red-hot cottage cheese curds. It can be rather fun playing guess-the-steel with something out of a scrapyard, but I think I'd buy new any time I really want to win.
Anvilfire is a better place to look for info on scrapyard steels good for bladesmithing than anything I can tell you as of now, though.
Steels that are not in a hardened state (lots of the type of microcrystal named martensite, and this is the stuff that makes hardened steel hard: it's not a chemical difference, but how the atoms are ordered in the crystalline structure -- analogous to the structural difference between graphite and diamond) can be cold-worked or hot-worked. Cold-working produces workhardening, which requires the metal to be annealed if coldworking is to continue without causing cracks in the steel.
You were hammering on mild steel, and the hardening you experienced was work-hardening. Mild steel is our civilization's answer to wrought iron. It has a carbon content of less than two-tenths of one percent by weight, and it's easily formed, easily cut, easily welded, easily polished. In a word, mild-mannered.
The opposite extreme is tool steel: close to one percent of carbon, and kept at full hardness. This is great for cutting other pieces of steel of more ordinary hardnesses, but it's also so brittle that tool steel cutters are actually obtuse-angled. You could smash the things hitting them with a hammer, so whacking tool-steel cutters isn't done.
In between, but leaning towards the tool steel, are the steels with enough carbon content to be hardenable by heat treating. They are workable enough at bright red heat, most of them. High carbon stainless alloys exist also, and make rugged knife blades but come out a tad too brittle to be completely satisfactory as sword blades, for which the simplest carbon steels and low-alloy steels like 5160, which is an almost-simple steel, are best. Bar-stock steels in 1070, 1085, 1090 or 1095 are among the best of steels for long blades. A 10xx steel is a plain-jane carbon steel, and the last two digits of the four gives the carbon content in hundredths of a percent, called "points of carbon" in the trade. Seventy points of carbon = 0.70% C; mild steels have twenty points, eighteen, or fifteen. High-carbon is trickier to weld, because as C increases, the temperature at which the steel starts to burn gets closer to its welding temp -- burnt steel is useless. This is where shield-gas welding rigs like MIG welders with all the bells and whistles really shine. High carbon is also trickier to cold-work, because it workhardens a lot faster.
Scrapyard sources for high-carbon steels are things like jackhammer bits, torsion bars, crowbars and old files. Auto springs are rather dubious, because they are so often a manganese steel and are notoriously "red short" which means if you hammer them at anything below orange heat they crumble into something that looks like red-hot cottage cheese curds. It can be rather fun playing guess-the-steel with something out of a scrapyard, but I think I'd buy new any time I really want to win.
Anvilfire is a better place to look for info on scrapyard steels good for bladesmithing than anything I can tell you as of now, though.
"The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone..."
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Thomas Powers
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And there is a chemical component to hardening steel; you can't harden a "steel" without the right alloys in it. In fact heating to red and quenching is the proper way to soften some steel alloys.
Note that the melting point of tin and the melting point of copper are wildly different but bronze is a rather common alloy.
Thomas
Note that the melting point of tin and the melting point of copper are wildly different but bronze is a rather common alloy.
Thomas
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Konstantin the Red
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Thomas Powers
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The austenitic stainless for one or any of the very low carbon deep drawing steels---think of 1008 for instance. Even something like 1018 should not harden appreciably when quenched.
The problem is that nowdays most "mild" steel you buy is A36 which is not a mild steel but a yield strength spec and so may have enough carbon in it to harden when quenched---or may not. What you are getting is 36KPSI yield strength or greater *not* a specific alloy---it's a real pain for blacksmiths as some techniques that previously worked *won't* with A36 and the cost of a "true" spec'd 1018 or 1020 is generally a lot higher than the gatbage can stew of A36.
Leaded steels for machining don't forge well as leaded brasses/bronzes don't either---a plus as we can avoid them and so not worry about heatlh problems working them hot... I'm beyond the reproductive toxin concern stage but a lot of you out there are *not*!
Thomas
The problem is that nowdays most "mild" steel you buy is A36 which is not a mild steel but a yield strength spec and so may have enough carbon in it to harden when quenched---or may not. What you are getting is 36KPSI yield strength or greater *not* a specific alloy---it's a real pain for blacksmiths as some techniques that previously worked *won't* with A36 and the cost of a "true" spec'd 1018 or 1020 is generally a lot higher than the gatbage can stew of A36.
Leaded steels for machining don't forge well as leaded brasses/bronzes don't either---a plus as we can avoid them and so not worry about heatlh problems working them hot... I'm beyond the reproductive toxin concern stage but a lot of you out there are *not*!
Thomas
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Sagebowman
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