I have A LOT of scrap stainless steel

[lastcowboy32]

Hi,

New guy.  Background:  Grew up on a dairy farm.  Became an electrical engineer.  Got into woodworking.  Got back into farming.  Got myself a welder and a Oxy-Acetylene torch setup to fix farm equipment (and, I'll admit... "just because")

We have the remnants of an old pipeline milking system on our farm:  About 130 feet of 2" diameter stainless pipe and an old, double-walled stainless steel 375 gallon milk cooling bulk tank (which is too old to get parts for anymore).

I've thought about scrapping them, but scrap is bringing next to nada at the moment.

I never really thought much about doing anything else, except turning the bulk tank into a BBQ setup (which I've seen others do).

Then, our youngest daughter starts dating a young man.  He comes up to help us do hay a couple of times, and he starts showing me pictures of his attempts at forging with minimal tooling.  The kid has some drive and interest, but not much material to work with.

So I start thinking about all of the stainless that we have laying around.

Is that a resource to play with to try some forging experiments?  What would be some good ideas to try to create from stainless?

 

[Mtnstream]

Just my opinion...I would try to find him some mild steel or even high carbon (old farm implements) before working the stainless. Stainless can be hard to move around and fickle under heat. I find I am clenching my teeth whenever working it, a clear sign that I am not realy enjoying myself

[ThomasPowers]

So Yes it can be used; but as mentioned it can be hard to work, loves abrasives for breakfast lunch and dinner, etc.

My suggestion is start by making things in mild steel or A-36 (NOT the same thing!) and then when you feel comfortable with making them start trying to make the same items out of stainless and learn it's particularities.  I'ved use scrap stainless for hand forged frying pans, eating sets---though I made the knife from 440C, items that will be located in a corrosive atmosphere---like near the sea shore.  A lot depends on the thickness of the material.

[lastcowboy32]

OK... it's hard to work with.  Noted.  

He and/or I should play around with easier types of iron/steel first.  Noted.

Hand forged frying pans?  Sounds fun...with the limitations above noted.

The other options for this scrap that are non-forged would involve cutting, bending and welding...which also are non-trivial.    Full disclosure, I've shunned buying a stick welder, why?  Because I want to do my welding with oxy-acetylene for a couple of reasons:

-OA makes its own shielding gas.

-OA welding consists of using a torch with one hand and holding filler in the other; which is much like TIG...which...to me...is the ultimate welder that I want to buy some day (with a plasma cutter, since we're in fantasy land)

-OA welding can, with proper technique and fluxes (in my understanding) weld more combinations of alloys and thicknesses than, say, stick or MIG

But the main, super secret, motivation is that I want to learn techniques that would allow me to make something(s) cool, aesthetically pleasing and/or useful from this stainless that I have.

 

As for old farm implements:  Yup, that kind of stuff, I have around as well.

I've also read that one should, at the beginning, work with some new pieces that are known alloys to reduce the number of variables with learning your technique...for instance...if you try a quenching technique for alloy A on a piece of scrap that is actually alloy B... it doesn't work...you then fuss with your quenching technique...but really you're off in the weeds; because you don't know the alloy.

[Kozzy]

The stainless isn't going anywhere so just let it sit until the right fabrication project comes up for it.  If you have some bar or all-thread in the mix, you might play with it in the forge to see how it feels, but it's not the most pleasing stuff to work with.  I used some 430 and T304 round bar that I had sitting around for a coal rake and such just because it was there and you can really see when banging just how much harder it is to move than mild.

The old farm junk pile is the place to go for some materials, especially the digging end if you will be making any hardened tools.  If you or a friend have a metal detector, it's also often quite productive to work some areas of the farm for the older stuff--some true wrought might pop up.  I have found a ton of wrenches, pliers, etc. that were dropped 50+ years ago and disappeared into the dirt at my old farmstead.  Those have come in handy as project materials.  I assume the old farmer usually drank breakfast and lunch because of the beer cans among the lost tools (and everywhere else)--it's the only explanation I can come up with for those.

[lastcowboy32]

I can sympathize with the excess of "scrap" beer cans.  We cleaned out a neighbor's old dairy barn once.  It was the typical construction with main carrier beams over the cows' heads that carried a skeleton of rafter beams that spanned the barn width.  What that meant was that there was an approximately 1' by 1' cubby hole on top of the carrier beams between the rafters.   Every one of those cubby holes was stuffed with beer cans.  We found beer bottles and bottle tops stuffed into the walls (these old barns typically had hollow walls, planked on the inside, sided on the outside with an air gap for "insulation") wherever there was a gap in the wall planks.

One source of "play metal" has come to mind from these suggestions, though.  I have a haybine, and I regularly change guards on it.  The scrap guards would be handy little nuggets of "play steel", I would think?

For the uninitiated, this is what I mean by a "guard".  It protects the knife sections on a sickle bar mower.  Each one is about the size of a large man's hand.

[JHCC]

When the rubble of the World Trade Center was being cleaned up and carted away, they would occasionally find newspapers from the late 1970s that had been tucked into corners of the structure by workers on their lunch breaks.

[Daswulf]

Those guards make great scrap sculpture bird heads. Just cut it in two and add a few ball bearings for the eyes. 

 

Looks like cast steel to me tho so I'm not sure how well it will forge. Give em a try. 

[Kozzy]

The problem with a lot of the more modern farm stuff is that it often has some really tough metals with lots of manganese and other spices which make it not so great for casual forging.  The stuff which is more of a "mid-century" vintage tended to use more common simple high carbon steels (in general but YMMV) so it leans toward being more user friendly when you need hardenable steels but not for something special enough to need certs.

Older stuff varied a bit more but things like spike harrow teeth tend to be pretty usable for hardenable steel and already in a usable size and shape.  And of course there were the spring tines on some of these which also tends to be decent material.  

If you have lots of one particular part (and friends with more), there are some interesting welding projects to be done.  The photo is welded up old mower points which farmers around here had by the bucket full (friend's retirement project, not mine).  Similar has been done with mountains of old horseshoes.  This is where the benefits of MIG start to pay off and the OA welding you mentioned earlier might start to seem less appealing as your SOP.

[lastcowboy32]

What you call "points", I call "sections".  That is a very cool dinosaur, but I shudder to think of how long I would have to save sections for this, as I might change ten or so per year.  :-)

The mention of spring teeth, though is useful; as I have a rake and tedder that both use spring steel teeth.  The tedder has spring teeth with a spring section sandwiched between two teeth that grab the hay.  I often scrap them out when only one tooth is gone; since they don't grab the hay as well.   That would still leave the central spring and the tooth itself.  Using them for something might make me feel better about the 12 bucks that I pay for replacements.

[Leeknivek]

Save the stainless for when you want to make a waste oil torch.

From what I understand, it can be contaminated to some degree if forged hot on regular steel. Plus you have to tend with alloying elements vaporizing and weakening and all the hocus pocus heat treat. To begin with, find a steel supplier and buy a couple 20 foot lengths of 1/2" round and 1/2" square and maybe some 3/8x1 bar stock. That'll cost you less than $50 if you pick it up, they usually will cut into 10' lengths for free, and there are very many projects than can be made from that. No special variables to worry about for a beginner, easy to work, and it's a uniform enough selection that it is easy to begin visualizing how this stuff works, in terms of volume-of-steel vs linear measurements alone. 

In addition, a small collection of high carbon scrap is good, too, for making simple tools. Old springs, chisels, hammers, axles ..... random bits and drops and plates ..... shear blades, cutting edges, old files .... there is a use for many thrown away tooling that people very often neglect to consider. There is a lot of good mystery steel out there that is "good enough" for lighter duty, homeowner grade, hobbyist grade, farm grade, or used-ten-times-in-its-lifetime tools. 

And, in my opinion, stainless isn't a particularly great alloy anyway. I mean, it has its utility in certain things - rust resistant, kind of heat resistant, moderately hard, moderately durable - but in blacksmithing terms .... I rarely ever use it and I doubt very many others use it often or ever, either. Doing commercial sheet metal fab + install, it's also used sparingly and is pretty awful to work with compared to mild. Mild steel is way more available, way less expensive and way more useful. You'll see! 

[ThomasPowers]

I like for things that will be exposed to the elements where you don't trust the owner to do regular maintenance.  Forged stainless has nice scale and can be ground or polished as well. However you need customers that are willing to pay for the extra work and materials cost just to have something "dishwasher safe"