we scrap alot of steel at work. So i grabed a pice wich is spring steel i think and did a spark test to see what it looked like so here is the first picture.in the second picture is a pice of 1095 steel i got from texas knife supply what do you all think good carbon steel ????

Has the 1095 been heat treated or has the spring steel been annealed?

the 1095 is annealed and as for the spring steel i have not annealed it

should i have annealed the spring steel. to properly compare it to the 1095 that is annealed this pice of spring steel is used in down hole logging tools in gas and oil wells. the pice we call it a bow spring . its purppose is to push the logging tools to the well bore for better reading of the tool. this pice is put in a gas or oil well in depths of 20.000 ft and as shallow as 300ft at 20,000ft the well temp gets to 500,deg

I dunno.....maybe the foto doesn't do the sparks justice

I'm no expert on spark testing but I'm seeing multiple bursts. I maybe don't see quite as much as the 1095, but it can be hard to tell from a picture. It definately looks like it is high enough to harden well, but there are a lot of "spring" steels out their and you will want to do some other tests to figure out how to heat treat it.

Probably pressing too hard against the wheel. The shower is too bright. Touch lightly against the wheel to better study the shorter and easier to read carrier lines.

If spark testing were all that reliable and accurate, steel manufacturers would save all the money the spend on labs and analysis and issue a certificate of Spark Test instead of a certificate of analysis. If you want to judge the carbon content, heat the steel to just above critical temperature and then quench in oil. Then see if a file will cut it, if the file just skates over the metal without cutting it, it is pretty high carbon. Make sure you clean the scale off where you intend to test with the file.

thanks guys on the grinder i pretty much let the wight of the grinder do the the grinding. No extra pressure was aplied.I will try to harden it and see what kind of effect i get

Hi. The first picture is quite a bit smaller than the second, so it is hard to compare. Obviously, these are different steels, however, and the first steel is quite a bit lower in carbon content than the second. It is a little strange: the second photo looks like there is a little chromium in there, but you say you bought this as 1095, so there must not be any. The first steel looks like it has less than 80 points, but you would need comparative coupons to tell. I would guess from the photo that it is like a rail clip, which is about 1060. It will harden up just fine, but it is not 1095. I use rail clips for tools, and they will shatter if you mess up the heat treat, forge them cold, weld them carelessly, or have cracks in them.