RR Track: Anneal and cut or heat and chisel?

[Jesse17]

I have some railroad track that I want to turn into knives. I cut an 8" length off with a cutting wheel, and now I want to reduce the bottom plate and the upright piece into strips 8" long and roughly blade width wide. The actual top part of the rail I'll draw out with a buddy's power hammer or on mine someday when I get it built.

Originally I planned to anneal the 8" length of track in my forge then cut it from both ends with my port-a-band saw, but then I thought it might be quicker and easier to just cut the strips with a chisel while it's hot.

The plan to anneal would be to stick it in my propane forge, heat it up then shut the forge down and close it up with firebrick to hold the heat in. Maybe use the PID controller to control the cooling rate. I don't know how well that will work. So my worry is that it might cool too fast and I end up still not being able to cut it with the band saw. But on the other hand, that's a lot of weight to be handling at forging temps if I decide to hot chisel it. I'm not really worried about handling it, but I've never split anything with a chisel yet, so I don't know how doable splitting 1/2" 1080-ish metal is.

So how would y'all go about this project?

[Frosty]

Just cut it with the porta band. The only place rail is hardened is the contact surface of the rail cap. That's where the train tire rides on it. You can cut rail with a cutoff band saw if you turn it flange up and tilt is a little so the blade is always cutting the induction hardened contact surface from beneath.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Jesse17]

I started out trying to cut it with the band saw. I was making no progress even on the edge of the bottom flange. But maybe I already killed the saw blade as I had already spent 5 min. of running the saw on the top edge of the rail, which resulted in a less than 1/8" deep cut. That's when I switched to a cutting wheel on the angle grinder, and an hour later it was cut. OK, an hour and a half, but I'm confident I could do another one in less than an hour now that I have a feel for it.

[BIGGUNDOCTOR]

We used a cheapie 4x6 band saw to cut the rail sections I have. Cut it no problem, get a new coarse pitch blade.

Wouldn't think rail was good knife material, but........

[Frosty]

Jesse: Ayup, touching the saw blade to the hardened wear surface of the rail will dull it immediately. Even bimetal blades don't fare too well. The cap is thin enough that when the carbides of a bi metal penetrate it, the softer metal below lets them penetrate more deeply and when it contacts the hardened surface again it isn't with it's cutting edge so the carbide gets chipped out of the blade.

You can cut RR rail with a 12tpi hacksaw in less than 45 mins. From the bottom.

Frosty The Lucky.

[njanvilman]

Annealing the rail would not hurt either before doing any cutting.  Put the section in your forge, bring the whole thing up to an orange heat and hold for at least 30 minutes.  Then turn off the flame, block up all openings, and go away for a day.  The slow cooling should help with whatever you plan to do with the steel.

[Charles R. Stevens]

80-90 point manganese steel? Should make a good knife, or any other tool for that matter

[arftist]

80-90 point manganese steel? Should make a good knife, or any other tool for that matter

​Agree. 

[Jesse17]

Thanks guys. I'll throw on a fresh blade and see if it won't cut the lower parts. If not, I'll try annealing it in the forge like njanvvilman described, and try again.