BowtoEd

First, I do live in the US for all those asking. I'm in the Pacific Northwest a few hours from the Canadian border. I looked and I couldn't find a picture of the nails I bought. I'm not worried about it; I've given up on the idea of cold-forging nails and then hardening them. For now, I've cut some strips off of an old carpenter's saw and I'm going to try playing with them. My objective isn't to make anything in particular. For now, I'm just trying to experience the basic process of heating steel to soften it, hitting it with a hammer, then heating it again to harden it. Maybe I will get into making small knives or mechanical parts for radios (for example, rotary mechanisms for engaging the tuning parts). The sky really isn't the limit but I like learning about new things. For now, I won't be investing much money in this. Maybe I'll get a ball peen hammer to replace the claw hammer I've been using and maybe I'll splurge and get a bar of tool steel from Jantz. My mentality has been, "if I walk into a store, what contains metal that will be useful for forging?" I don't intend on building a forge as of yet and I will continue to use the small flame on the kitchen stove. Eventually I might build a forge but I want to see the process working first-hand. Maybe the judgment I'm using is flawed. I'm also not interested much in hot-forging. Because I don't have a designated area just for blacksmithing, I think it's better to limit my involvement while I learn what is going on. That's all I really know for now; once I figure out a bit more I think I might get involved and maybe even make a few knives. Ed

So, I'm not sure where to look for some better steel. My target is something that can be bought cheaply at thrift stores or Wal-Mart for high-volume, low cost (hence, the box of nails). I don't know how to discover the makeup of steel in things that I find around. What about hack saw blades?

Okay, so nails were a poor choice for a blacksmithing experiment. The problem is that I would need something pretty small if I want to rerun the experiment with new steel. My stove burner seemed to work for softening the steel but not hardening it. I did soften several spoons today. This was for making coat hooks. That turned out well except they didn't polish out as well as I'd have liked. The nails make good rivets although I think I want a harder hammer to peen them. What should I expect to pay for a great ball pein hammer? Ed

Hello all, I've been reading about blacksmithing, knife making, metal working, etc, for several years. Tonight I actually tried something and found that all I know conflicted with reality. I bought a pound of steel nails at Home Depot. The reason was to use them as rivets in certain projects. I have a pop-riveter but I think those rivets would be terrible in comparison to peened steel rivets. I build vacuum tube amps and I like the chassis to be rock-solid. I subscribe to the term "battleship construction" for my transmitting equipment because they're built with lots of metal and lots of fasteners. Anywho, I annealed a few nails tonight so the peening process would go easier. I heated them to red-orange on the gas stove and then, once they stopped glowing, set them on a board atop the counter so they could cool slowly. I heated the head-end of a dozen, then heated the head and point end of another one. I took at it with a hammer (unfortunately, I don't have a ball-peen so I used my larger claw hammer) and tapped it against my anvil. I have an actual anvil but it's one of those 1 or 2-pound jeweler's anvils. After about an hour of hammering and filing, I went back to harden it. I was trying to make a small knife out of the nail, just to experiment with this stuff. My process for hardening comes right from everything I've read...heat it to red-orange just as done with annealing. Once there, instead of letting it air-cool, quench it in water or oil to remove the heat quickly. Well, not wanting to waste oil I tried water first. After five minutes, I took it out and pressed on the side. Without much pressure, the blade bent over easily. I straightened it out and tried again with similar results. The blade was softer now than it had been while I was working it. I poured a little olive oil in a cup and tried with that. The blade was softer still. Clearly there's something wrong with my process. Maybe nail steel is a strange animal that just won't behave. I'm not going to buy special tool steel or build a forge capable of heating a large block because this was just an experiment. I do want to figure out why my process didn't work though. Thanks for the information. I've read some of the posts here and it seems like this is a really solid knowledge base.