I was told many years ago by a guy who I would consider to be an outstanding blacksmith. I mean he did beautiful curved staircases and beautiful ornate scroll work as well. You name it he could make it and he even studied blacksmithing in Spain and pretty much if he said it I tended to believe it.

But he told me that real wrought iron when heated up to a yellow heat acts a lot like mozzarella cheese in that it could be pulled and stretched and you can really do some wild crazy things with the stuff. I've never worked wrought Iron but this seems to me looking back now to be a little bit far fetched and maybe he was just pranking me. But he seem quite serious about it. So is this true or false? Come now somebody's gotta know a little about this just seems to good to be true!

Really, wrought moves easier than modern steel but it must be worked very hot and you can't work it below a certain temp otherwise it will begin to split.  So no, his assessment is incorrect.  Wrought has its benefits but being able to stretch it like warm cheese isn't one of them.  It takes less hammer weight to move the same amount of material but modern steel has a broader heat range to work so you get more time to work it during each heat.

Working temp for wrought irons is often above the burning temp for modern steels---when you are working it at almost white hot it is extremely pliable.  Much old wrought iron is very very low in carbon which also helps softness under the hammer. (But not all! There are wrought iron based steels out in the scrap stream too.)  So pounding it out is easier but upsetting can be a problem---many times they were more prone to just forge weld on more when they needed more mass; they would also bend stock around and forge weld it to get eyes rather than punch and drift--why you get the bow tie axe method with WI rather than the punch and drift that some folks use nowadays.  Wrought iron came in a wide range of quality.  Working the top grades is a joy working the bottom grades is a real pain.

I was reading a story a few years back about an old smith and he was lamenting how wrought iron was hard to find and it being replaced by mild steel. He was saying how much easier wrought iron was to forge weld. But mild steel needed to be brought to a very high temperature to be able to forge weld and that he kept burning it.

Well thanks for the info. I thought he was joshing me it would be wonderful if steel had this quality though,It would be like working with melted glass lol.

IIRC "Practical Blacksmithing" had a discussion on how to work the "new"  metal and the differences welding were a big part of it. (I believe the change from using fluxes like ground glass or clean quartz sand to things like borax was a big part of the change in materials being welded.)

Yes, ... which are "better", ... Redheads or Brunettes ?

I suspect it has a lot to do with your personal experience.

My momma was a redhead and she was mean as xxxx. I'll stick with the brunettes!

Smoothbore, one is fun to play with, one you marry and one you didn't mention is fun to look at...

Well It seems I've offended the moderator over childish stuff there for I guess I need to be moving on. Here take that! 

Well I think most of us have been moderated at some point; I've at least two that I recall; one was a typo and the other was a phrase I had used in Church to my pastor the day before....no need to move on unless you are afraid you can't edit your posts to fit the site's rules of decorum???- (like the rest of us do...)

Glenn started this sight when his boys were kids, and I imagine he is looking forward to his grandkids reading what's here. So it's understandable. But like TP I get warnings as well...

Maybe I overreacted a bit. just "Gosh,diddly darn it" don't do it for me. tell ya what though I'll delete my bad word. ah too late he done got it. No we're cool. been working on other stuff but I'm finishing up the swage and then I'll make a stand.

 

I generally take the comic book rout, let you guess at the expletive, lol. Honestly if your not a compleat sphincter Glenn and co. are pretty cool. 

But Charles; some of your posts look like they are entirely comic book expletives; I try to treat them like I do reading Dutch---let my eyes go out of focus and read stuff phonetically and guess...

Well I know one for sure and that's this... If Helen of Troy looked anything like Barbara Eden I can see how the Trojan war got started!

Maybe off topic, but I wanted to talk about wrought iron. We often hear about it being welded at high temperatures with so many sparks, it can be called a "snowball hear." But there have been many wrought iron edge tools made that have high carbon steel laid in for the cutting edge. In these instances, the welding heat is "light", what I call a sweating heat...no sparks. Any higher heat would crumble the steel.

Thank you TP, I needed that! Lol

stress level is a bit high, and I am bumping hard against the stops (mildly symptomatic). I really needed the laugh, I do apretitivapritiative good natured jabs

Well not wrought Iron related but I've often wondered why not forge weld some carbon steel into these rail road knifes to give the knife a better edge?

That's how you make a Knife from a RR spike, weld in a HC steel bit. Other wise they're more wall hangers than good users. You can put an edge on most anything but to be a decent knife it needs to be hard enough to take a good edge and tough enough to not break in use. Some blades don't need to be tough, just really hard say a scalpel and others need to be tough and flexible say a sword.

Frosty The Lucky.

Wrought iron eyes need to be wrapped rather than punched for structural integrity.

Charles, There but for the grace of a built in spell checker go I!    Some times I type things out and 90% of it is redlined and I end up re-editing a bunch of times.  I've been twitted on my word choice at times but have decided that widening vocabularies for folks is not a bad thing.

Oh, I have to find alternative word choices, either because I can't figure out how to spell it or because I can't remember the dang word I'm looking for!

12 minutes ago, Charles R. Stevens said:

Oh, I have to find alternative word choices, either because I can't figure out how to spell it or because I can't remember the dang word I'm looking for!

I thought that was because I am over 40(???????) and have CRS Disease (Can't Remember Squat).

Neil

As my daughter is fond of pointing out, those are my initials...

but then again, Dannie Ray McMicheal "doesn't remember much"... 

40's?  Let me sit and think a while and maybe I can remember my 40's.....let's see kids were in school; I was working in Columbus OH for Bell Labs and smithing out of a 1920's detached, collapsing garage---used to have a wood stove in part of it and they had burned the date on the inner wall with a hot poker...2 different jobs and 1.5 different locations since then...