According to xray :
I have some random steel rods I picked up locally. I'm not sure of the
material. Two of them have colors painted on one of the ends: red on one
and orange on the other. I'm wondering if these colors tell me what they
are?
If you can tell us which steel vendor they originally came from.
Really -- each vendor has his own set of codes. I could look up
the ones which Jorgensen steel uses, but I don't have a convenient
source for the others.
I found this link...
http://www.southerntoolsteel.com/color_codes.html
which lists color codes, but I'm wondering how trustworthy it is. The
entry for 12L14 says "black and white". I assume that means it could be
either, rather than it should have both.
Nope -- it should have both. (Otherwise, they would have said
"black *or* white", not "and".
This is because there are more steel alloys (and other metals)
than there are reasonably identifiable colors, so they have to use two
(or sometimes even three) colors to mark the metals unequivocably.
Jorgensen has several where there is a primary color plus a stripe of
another color.
And the Jorgensen catalog lists a lot more metals than your web
vendor does.
And this is only for metals from this one vendor.
That entry bothers me because I
bought some 12L14 end scraps from eBay and things don't seem to match
the table I found. Some are white, which does match, but a couple are
copper color and one is red.
Again -- from different original vendors, so you can't expect
the color codes to match.
Is the color code a useful way to identify scrap steel?
Nope -- because with scrap, you are unlikely to know who the
original vendor is.
Now -- you could pick some vendor's color code chart to which
you have access, and paint any incoming steel which you can identify to
match.
Is there a
better reference on end colors somewhere?
The problem is that there are *lots* of them. And they all
disagree. :-)
Can anyone tell me what my two
steel rods with red and orange ends probably are?
*If* it came from Jorgensen:
Red 1040/42/45
Orange 1213.1215
Black with White stripe 1035
Brown & White Leaded Grade A (Ledloy A, La-Led) (their 12L14)
Green Leaded Grade B (LedLoy B, Super La-Led)
Pink & Purple Leaded Grade AX (LedLoy AX)
Thanks for any enlightenment you can share.
Well ... I'm sure that this is not what you wanted to hear --
but it is the real world, so I'm afraid that you are stuck.
Good Luck,
DoN.
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