So I'm moving into new territory on this one. I forged a saxon style 4 bar billet, consisting of a cutting edge which is bloomery steel I made a Ric Furrers smelting class, and 3 bars of wrought iron. My questions are how different is the normalization process from damascus made of 1084/15n20, and how do I go about hardening/tempering? The bloomery steel is about medium carbon steel judging by the spark trail.

Rusty

If you take a look in the Knife making section, you should find your answers, if not, then do so, and then you may be able to ask more detailed questions and you may get more detailed assistance.

OK bloomery steel probably does not have the alloying to profit from normalization and so doing so will only result in grain growth---you did leave a piece to experiment with heat treating right? (Not all modern alloys do either---at least the ASM handbook says that S-1 should not be normalized!)

Grain refinement is most likely through recrystallization due to deformations. Or in other words *this* is where the old wives tale about "edge packing" comes from---early pretty much unalloyed steels!

It should be a shallow hardening water quench steel at mid carbon levels.

Or in other words: heat treating designed for modern alloys pretty much has squat to do with 1000 year old type steels.

If you didn't leave a sample to test your heat treat process you are kinda like jumping out of an airplane not real sure if your parachute will work.... On the other hand you can always weld up the remains and try again...

I'd strongly suggest talking with Ric to see how other examples of this ore and process have acted.

I am so jealouis about the class with Ric Fuirre,,if I was younger and hungry i would be at his door even if it is a country breadth away,,,,i would give him a call ,,i bet he can save you a lot of experimenting for this blade.....

I did get in touch with Ric, he gave me the info i needed. Ive got another bar of the bloomery steel to mess around with along with a paper cup full of smaller pieces of the bloom that I'm in the process of consolidating, which will be my "test subject" to experiment on. Thanks for the info Thomas, I'm curious to see what I come up with after a few heat treating variations.

What did Ric suggest?

He told me to heat treat/normalize similar to a mid carbon steel blade, and that the iron should have no shadow and the bloomery steel should have a long transition line because the slag insulates the steel a bit. I'm giving it a go later today, we'll see how it goes.

I'm no expert in heat treating but wouldn't welding three bars of wrought iron to one bar of medium carbon leave you with a piece of steel with very low carbon because of the carbon migration?

yup in many cases, but wrought iron can have carbon.

Oh for sure it can have carbon, you just never know how much. It just depends on what they used to make it. The chances of it being very high are slim tho.

A bloomery can produce anything from zilch carbon up to cast iron---2+% carbon. (And often will produce the *entire* range in a run!) It was the more modern methods of making wrought iron that tended to keep the C down as that was more useful in everyday work.

Best to test: over heat a sample and look at the grain then thermal cycle and see if it refines on it's own.