When selling something made from scrap I find that folk like to know where it came from. Telling someone who is looking at a RR spike knife that it started life on the Union Pacific or the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (I know it dates me but I still think of them as the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, the Great Northern, and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe) increases their interest. It deepens the story of the item.

Also, a reasonable number of folk ask where I get my steel. They seem to think it cool that I use other things and also many don't know that there are places you can go to buy new steel.

I realize that there are lots of things I don't know much about but I am sometimes surprised at the basic things that some people don't know. I have to wonder how they are let out without adult supervision. I recently had a man (I would guess college educated by his dress and speech) who admitted that he didn't know the difference between a RR spike and a RR tie and how RR tracks were put together. Maybe its because I grew up around railroads but that seemed a hole in basic knowledge of the world and how it works. I guess I follow Robert Heinlien/Lazarus Long that a person should know as much as possible about as many things as possible and be competent in as many areas as possible. And don't get me started on people's basic ignorance of history.

Broadly,
George M.

I thought salvaging is using old materials for the job they were intended for, eg cladding as cladding, whilst repurposing is using materials to create something different?

I think of salvaging as the act of getting used materials, such as pulling silo bands from a rubble pile...
repurposing is more like using a maytag washing machine engine to power a go-cart.
As blacksmiths EVERY piece of metal we forge is by definition repurposed because we are changing its size, shape, etc...
smith out

"Repourposing" in my opinion, is taking something old and making something new out of it, but still keeping it's original form identifiable.
RR spike knives, steak turners or whatever still resemble RR spikes. Using old garden rakes as coat or tool hooks, old wooden shutters as mail holders, or milk jugs as bird feeders, etc. would fall into that catagory since you could instantly see what they were originally used for. People (like me) like these items because it offers a unique, and sometime artsy new look at everyday items that would otherwise fill a landfill somewhere.

Brake drums used in forges on the other hand may be considered "salvaged", since most people would never notice what that was before becoming your forge. Same thing with springs or any other metal drastically changed into an entirely new form.

Make sense?

Aw, I was just joking mostly. Repurposing means literally using a thing for something it wasn't intended for. I just let yuppyese irk me and that's my issue.

Salvage, scrounge whatever, then you "repurpose" it, blacksmith's been doing that since we had to "repurpose" meteorites.

Frosty The Lucky.

Makes a difference when it may be 100 miles to get to a specialty store; the "junk pile" suddenly becomes worth it's weight in gasoline!