Jump to content
I Forge Iron

Reflections on wrought iron


Recommended Posts


WI can trip you up unexpectedly quite easily,is very organic in it's nature and composition :) .


Yes Yes Yes! this is what I'm talking about. This is what makes it so different from steel you have to watch it be more careful with your heats but at the same time it can do things steel won't . Its sort of fragile in some ways and in others very resilient. Steel is predictable and homogeneous. Wrought seems more direct in some ways.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Wear can show the WI grain structure too; I've seen it in old church door handles in England that had a polished surface from use that you could see the pattern in as well as the Schöner Brunnen in Nuremberg, DE where the wrought iron surround has wear marks where people stand on it to touch the "lucky ring".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes,Bob,very much so.And even,(if possible) more challenging than wood,as you can't see the grain flaws often.
Many things change,in my experience.The "brashness" becomes much more of an issue,at fullered sections in particular.As a matter of fact i believe that one needs to use larger radius of all fullers on WI because of that.And watch it carefully with over the edge of an anvil work.
Also,harmonics.It's considerably easier to bounce off a fragile element from an insufficiently supported end of work while working on it's opposite end.Dampening the vibration is one solution,but in essence it changes the very strategy,the sequence of operations.
I'm sure that this list of differences can be considerably enlarged upon by everyone present!
And that's why sometimes with a sigh of relief i fall back onto some new,fresh,cold-rolled 1020 or the like,and remember this friend of mine,who came out of a liquor store each evening with a half-rack of the absolutely cheapest beer,and always said:"How they make it so good,and sell it so cheap?!"We're very lucky to have access to all that new,predictable mild,it truly is a priviledge.
Both have their particular points,i'm very glad that this discussion was brought up,as these differences are very important.Thanks,everyone.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am with Jake on this! I do like the natural affinity of the wrought iron for rustic finish pieces... but overall I find it a strenuous material to work with and I am usually quite happy to go back to my modern steels! It is a pretty nice situation to be able to choose though! More choice is BETTER as far as I am concerned.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

When my smithery school was relatively new in the 1970's, one of my students had ordered a few hundred pounds of the Swedish charcoal iron. Apparently, it was no longer being made, but there was a stockpile of it on the docks to be sold. He sold me some, and I still have a little. It is wonderful stuff to forge, more forgiving than say, the "cheesy" wagontire iron that you sometimes encounter. You can work it from lemon into a bright cherry.

In general, wrought iron has very low tensile strength. When cutting on the hardie for instance, when it gets cardboard thin, the shearing blow will break it. I got some of the Wisconsin iron recently, and flattened it to sheet metal to make a lock escutcheon, and it behaved very well, no splits or separations. Pretty good stuff.

Ref the spark test, my experience with quality WI is that there will be no bursting. However, you will get a few bursts from dead soft steel wire, including binding wire. In touching the WI lightly to the wheel, you'll get a shower of fairly straight carrier lines with "sprigs." Sprigs are short branches coming off of the carrier lines. At the end of the shower, you'll see an occasional space and a "dash." The WI incandescence is a little darker that that of MS. Regarding spark testing, compare the unknown to the known.

http://www.turleyforge.com Granddaddy of Blacksmith Schools

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There are some seriously qualified folks here that will answer this better,but i'll go ahead and sqwauk anyway(beats going out and starting work,just one more cup of mud...).

Probably,most WI was puddled.The process contingent on the fact that the lower the C,the higher the melting point.
So,the pig-iron(cast,4-5% C)was remelted,and as the C burned away in the pot,joining with the O, the blob of future WI congealed around the stirring rod.
After it reached a certain viscosity it was taken out to the power-hammer and faggoted,further refining the grain,to whatever grade desired.
I'd imagine that in the further reheating sequence more decarb took place as well.
All of the above applies to the Industrial Age before the Bessemer process,or so it's filed in me pea-brain.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The pig iron was produced from iron furnaces. For example, let your search engine look for Cornwall Furnace or Meramec Furnace. They were in constant blow 24-7, and there were boo coo of them in the East and Midwest. The process was termed indirect. First, they had to make the high carbon pigs. Then they were refined and the carbon driven out as gases, in finery hearths.

http://www.turleyforge.com Granddaddy of Blacksmith Schools

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Not quite true, Jake. It's absolutely true that there's tremendous variety in the composition and properties of WI; it took me several years (and playing with WI, some of which I eventually realized would get quite hard in water, even though I had read that WI was "nearly pure iron" -- what a bunch of BS) to figure this out. But there is such a thing as wrought iron -- a material that's distinguishable from steel in due to the presence of significant amounts of silica slag stringers throughout the iron (an artifact of the manufacturing process), which give it some interesting properties. (And if it's made by traditional charcoal processes it'll normally have little or none of the sulfur and manganese that are found in modern steels. Sulfur comes from coal based smelting processes, and manganese is added to neutralize the sulfur.)

Are we picking the nit here. How about steel Many grades but its all steel. Same for SS or Aluminum or Ti or even cast iron. A few on here have access to the equipment to actually test stuff. For the rest of us it's a crap shoot.
Can't even go by the steel suppliers all the time. 3 times in the past I have gotten 8" steel bars specs specified.
parts were cut then CNC machined then welded into a 3/4" plate. The welds started cracking right down the center.Oops
they sent leaded bar. They replaced the bars but we lost a week of machineing and a week of welding. I lost another week cause they wanted to save the machined plates.Spark tests? Do green,gray,brown wheels and grinding disks all show the same spark and do we all see the same? Did the Wi come from a marine salvage a manure wagon or an out of the weather source? To me it's sorta like. "How long does it take to forge a 6" taper" Red yellow or white hot.
1.5, 2, 2.5, or 3lb hammer(or power hammer)Is the Wi once worked twice or 3-4-5 times worked.
Ken.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

So the direct process of smelting WI from ore was the Bloomery process

The indirect process went from Ore to Cast Iron and then Cast Iron to Wrought Iron, (Puddling was the most common though there were others especially at the start---like the waloon process)

Probably the *last* process was the Byers process where they would take bessemer steel and pour it into slag and then mechanically mix it with hydraulic presses.

The book put out by the Byers company: Wrought Iron: Its Manufacture Characteristics and Applications, James Aston; Edward B. Storey; is easily found fairly inexpensively and has a lot of good info in it if you want to know about WI.

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Have you looked at pureiron.com ? it is not wrought iron but it is lovely stuff to use, they are producing it commercially and can ship abroad.



I got a piece gratis from pureiron when I attended the ABANA conference in Seattle. What is the difference in it and wrought? Also look in back issues of Anvil's ring (in the classifieds). Someone had come across tons of wrought iron fence posts. I believe they were 1 1/4" x 5 or 6 foot long.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...