MattBower

Any insulation that's meant for the home is going to turn into glassy goo well before it reaches any serious forging temperature. You could possibly use something like that for additional efficiency if it were outside a couple layers of something like Kaowool or Inswool, and protected from direct contact with forge temperature flames. [Later: OK, maybe not. This stuff is for insulating chimneys, and some of those have pretty reasonable temperature resistance. But I wouldn't buy it without knowing for sure. Contact the manufacturer and ask about the maximum continuous service temp for this stuff. I haven't been able to find it.] Freon will convert to phosgene gas if it gets hot enough. Very bad news. They used phosgene as a chemical warfare agent in WWI. See here: http://meeting.chest...ract/136/4/9S-c Perhaps not a problem with abrasive wheels, but it'd still make me nervous if I wasn't 100% sure the cylinder was totally empty. Before cutting any suspect cylinder I punch a small hole in the bottom, open the valve, submerge the cylinder upside-down in a drum (or garbage can) full of water, and let the cylinder fill completely until there are no more bubbles, even when I wiggle it around a bit.

Wow, nice looking anvil! Great find.

Bright orange in bright light is indeed way too hot. To my eye, in dim light 1500 looks about the color of an orange. Just a shade above nonmagnetic is a reasonable approximation. Tempilaq is a better solution, although it tends to scrape off in solid fuel forges unless you use a muffle. An even better solution would be to learn to recognize decalescence, which is the point at which the phase change to austenite happens. It is literally visible in the steel if you know what to look for. See here: http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/topic/26894/Decalescance But you have to catch it as the temperature is rising; recalescence (the reverse process on the way down) happens at a much cooler temperature, and by the time you see it you've missed the window for quenching.

I think someone sent you the wrong steel. I don't see another explanation.

The Wiki link pretty much says it all.

That is too hot, at least according to my calibrated eyeball's estimate of yellow-orange, but it doesn't explain why the steel didn't get hard. I too am starting to wonder if your 4140 isn't 4140.

Yeah. It's a form of cast iron. It's currently used as feedstock in steel mills --the ones that aren't remelting scrap -- and for making other forms of cast iron. That includes ductile iron, which you asked about before.

I second the question. What temp were you quenching from?

Your grain looks fairly coarse, which leads to brittleness. You likely overheated prior to the quench. How are you determining temperature? "Bright orange" is very subjective, and a whole lot depends on ambient light.

Can we see a pic of the end "grain" of one of the broken pieces? And how thick was it? If I find a warp after the quench, I generally straighten it hot and start the whole heat treating process over. However, believe it or not, it is possible to remove the blade from the quench bath while it's still relatively hot (500+ degrees F) and remove warps with your gloved hand. Although the eventual formation of martensite is determined by the speed of the early portion of the quench, martensite doesn't actually begin to form in your blade until much lower temperatures (between 400 and 500 F is a good guess for simpler steels, or you can look it up on a TTT diagram; it'll be marked Ms). There's a period after the quench, when the blade is still cooling, where it's still austenite, and thus very soft and ductile. So it's very easy to fix warps by hand while the blade is in that temperature range. If you don't believe me, watch this. http://straightrazorplace.com/forge/51453-interupted-quench-2.html

As I believe I said in another thread, I'm personally very skeptical of the idea of starting out with tool steels like S7 and H13 with little or no experience and very limited equipment. They're hard to forge, hard to heat treat properly (by which I mean you follow the recommended heat treating procedures, rather than a simple blacksmith's heat treat), and expensive -- in the case of H13, very expensive. There would be no real point in forge welding S7 to H13. H13 is extremely tough steel in its own right. It's also more heat resistant than S7.

+1 to what arftist said. It's not that we don't want to help, but "teach me everything I need to know" is asking a bit much. I second the recommendation of The Complete Modern Blacksmith; I haven't read the other one. And here's something to get you started: http://www.webpal.or...acksmithing.pdf (Don't take everything in there -- or any other book -- as holy writ. When it comes to most of what we do as blacksmiths, there are many ways to skin the cat.)

You really have no good way of knowing the details of this situation, i.e., who the rightful owner is at this point. Under the circumstances, I'd give it back to the barber and get myself out of the middle. I would not give it back to the original owner, because you have no way of knowing it's still his. Let the two of them sort it out. It's just an anvil. Don't turn it into some kind of idol.

DI is a form of cast iron, and only slightly less trouble to arc weld than other types of cast iron. I'm not sure I understand your plan. What exactly is it that you want to build under the forge? Will it really benefit from using ductile? If mild steel would do, it'd be easier to get good welds.

Here's Curly's: Google "oliver hammer -clothes."

Yep. Winchester didn't invent ductile iron, but they did start using it for the receiver on the Model '94 in 1964. That went on until sometime in the '80s. (Winchester made a number of changes in 1964 to cut costs. A lot of folks perceive the pre-'64 quality as having been much better, which is why when you look at gun classifieds you'll see some Winchesters identified as "pre-'64.") It makes Model '94s from that era hard to refinish. Ductile iron apparently doesn't accept most forms of bluing very well (or maybe it's just that the surface doesn't polish up very nicely), so Winchester electroplated those receivers with iron, then blued them. Stripping the old bluing also strips the electroplating -- which leaves you with a problem.

This is a topic that has interested me for a couple years, ever since I started to realize that not all cast iron is created equal. Ductile iron is pretty neat stuff. It's far superior to white and gray cast iron as far as mechanical properties. It's as strong as or stronger than lower carbon steels, and considerably tougher than other grades of cast iron (even malleable iron). It is used in some cases as a replacement for carbon steel, because it machines easily due to its graphite content, without the need to add sulfur, lead, etc., to the alloy. And of course it's cast, which is nice when you want to produce complex shapes that would be costly and time-consuming to machine. But it doesn't have quite the toughness of steel, particularly good hardened and tempered tool steels. There are some very reasonable quality anvils and struck tools made of ductile iron. I have a ductile iron tomahawk drift that has held up well in the face of some pretty severe beatings. A properly heat treated H13 drift would hold up vastly better, but would probably cost at least ten times as much. Like steel, there are a number of different grades of ductile iron, each with their own properties. A ferrous metallurgist told me that some has an as-cast Rockwell hardness or 60 or more. Some grades can be quenched and tempered like steel. The same metallurgist had a TFS ductile iron anvil that he was very happy with; he said he just tried to be a little more careful about the edges, because they were likely to be more chip-prone than steel. Here's a good reference concerning performance of metals used in anvils, including various steels and 80-55-06 ductile iron: http://www.hybridburners.com/documents/M-Main-on-anvil-steel.pdf With all that said, you should still be very cautious about anything labeled "cast iron." If it doesn't say specifically what kind of cast iron, then it's probably gray or white iron, and it's not going to make a very good anvil or struck tool. If it's made of the good stuff, that's a selling point and they'll probably say it up front.

That occurred to me as well!

The more I think about this, the more I think the idea of cutting off the delam'd part of the face -- and then grinding back a little further to be sure he hasn't left a part of the separation that isn't visible to the naked eye -- might be a good bet. I think it'd be just like stop drilling a crack in sheet metal. If he's going to have to avoid working on that part of the face anyway, there'd be no real harm in losing it. And it wouldn't prevent a Gunter method repair later, if that turned out to be necessary. It'd be cosmetically ugly and, as he put it, a little sacrilegious, but I don't see any other real down side.

That's always the problem with committees, but since I've never attempted an anvil repair, I wanted to get some input before I start spouting off to this guy about all the cutting, grinding and welding he should do on his anvil. He just bought it, so we don't know the history. He hasn't done any work on it yet. The face is 18" long, so he can definitely work around a ~3" delam on on end. (Though I personally do a lot of work on the edge of the step behind the horn, so I'd be annoyed if I couldn't use that. But if someone wanted to give me a Hay-Budden at a good price, I could probably learn to live with it. ) I'll try to post an update if and when there's news.

A36 is actually the name of an ASTM standard for structural carbon steel. (No doubt they chose "36" due to the minimum yield strength requirement.) It does have a chemical composition component, which includes a maximum carbon range of 0.25%-0.29%, although I don't really know how to square that with the reliable reports of very hard A36. Anyway, here's the standard: http://www.burwill.com/download/product/A36.pdf

A36 is a performance standard with a fairly loose allowable range for chemistry. The composition standard for 1018 is tighter. In practice, I've been told that 1018 is commonly sold as A36 (since it meets the standard), and I have experienced that myself. A36 at the minimum allowable strength for that grade will be substantially weaker than 1018. Of course a lot of A36 probably exceeds the minimum by a good bit. Some people have said they've experienced problems forge welding some batches of A36. The explanation I've seen for this is that the permissible chemistry for A36 allows for inclusion of some elements that could cause welding problems. A lot of A36 will forge weld just fine; it's just the occasional batch or even individual piece that seems to cause problems.

So I know a guy who recently bought a Hay-Budden, and the front of the face, on the horn endthat's starting to delaminate. There's about a 3" section of the face that has separated from the body. I told him that I don't think arc welding around the perimeter of the crack is going to be very effective, and to it right he'd have to preheat the whole anvil hot enough that there'd be a risk of screwing up the temper. I see a few options, a couple of which I haven't seen suggested before. (1) Try the perimeter weld, with or without preheat. (2) Continue to use the anvil, avoiding working on the delaminated part of the face, and repair it by the Gunter method if and when it completely delaminates. That could be a long time. (3) Remove the delaminated section -- cut it off, then grind back to where the weld is still solid. This may sound crazy, but I wonder if vibration on the already delaminated part of the face doesn't tend to contribute to the problem spreading. (4) Clamp the loose part of the face to the body as tightly as possible, drill a few holes through the delam'd part into the body (easier said than done), tap them, slather some grade 8 bolts with JB weld, run them in, and grind off the heads flush with the face. This doesn't run the risk of screwing up the face temper, but I don't know how it'd hold up or even if it'd be counterproductive. What are your thoughts?

I hadn't either, but I Googled them and, sure enough, it looks like some were made of CI. I've also seen them in stainless.

There was a thread about it here a month or two ago. In the paper I saw they were making it in thin sheet steel, with an eye toward auto bodies and the like. I'm not sure how well the process would scale to something, say, the thickness of a blade, if that's what you have in mind.