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spaco

wrote:
Hi Pete
I don't know if I would call that old puddle steel 1095 or even high
carbon, I've worked and welded some of that old iron and steel, and it
was altogether other material, ----
I think we are talking pre-puddling here for my friend's stuff. When
you make wrought iron in the old one-step process, you sometimes get
chucks of bloom that sat around the fuel (charcoal) for longer than the
rest and so became higher in carbon. The workers learned to spot those
pieces when pulling the bloom out or later when consolidating it;
separating it from the rest for use in tool edges. I'm not exactly
sure when Wootz steel or blister steel was developed, but those are some
other earlier ways of getting the carbon content up.

There's a guy in England who makes $50,000 suits of reproduction armor
who claims that, in the 1500's (his period of emulation) they could
produce 1060 reliably.

I know this is a woodturning group, but you all have to use steel and
steel alloy tools, so, FYI-----
Iron + Carbon = Steel. (Also "Steel" includes Iron plus a lot
of other alloys these days). Pure iron would have NO carbon.
Real "Wrought Iron" has (usually) less than 0.1 % carbon. Today's
"mild steel" (the stuff you'd get if you went to a steel yard and asked
for a "piece of steel for a backyard project" probably has a carbon
content of between 0.18 % and 0.30%. This is generally considered too
low a carbon content to harden.
When the carbon content gets to about 0.45%, you have a steel that
can be hardened (made brittle) by heating to a red heat and then
quenching in water or oil)---
and then reheated to a lower temperature (tempering) to get rid of
some of the brittleness.
The steel we have been talking about here is called "1095". The
"10" means it's a plain "Carbon Steel", containing iron, carbon, and
hardly anything else. The "95" means is has a carbon content of 0.95%.
That's pretty high for steel.
Just to carry this carbon thing to a conclusion, if the carbon
content goes much above 1.5% to 2 or 3 %, you get cast iron, which
can't be forged by normal processes.

What kind of a power hammer do you have ??

I have a Little Giant 50 pound hammer in my shop and seven or eight more
in a shed.

We had one with a 3 foot cast flywheel on a crank with an adjustable
rod, connected to a rocking stack of leaf springs that was moving the
hammer shaft up and down, and all that was connected to a riveted
steel plate body that was filled with concrete I think, not sure of
that anymore, it was an antique alright but worked just fine when
needed.
This one might have been called a "Helve Hammer". I assume it was
powered by some mechanical means? Was it shop-made or a commercially
available hammer? In America's history, there were dozens, if not
scores of manufacturers of steel-hammering devices. It is interesting
to see the breadth of ideas that actually made it to the field.

Pete Stanaitis