Hello everyone. I purchased some o1 a while ago and I just got around to working with it, and the spark that comes from it is strange. Mind you, I've never worked with o1 before, so this is new to me. 

The spark was very short and dark red, rather than the long branching yellow sparks common from HC steel. I was using a brand new cut off wheel in an angle grinder, if that makes a difference. 

I'm just wondering if this is normal for o1. Like I said, I have no experience with it, but the spark is making me question if I truly got what I paid for  

Thanks in advance. 

Piece of 01 on my grinder just now. Orange sparks.

Hope this helps.

They are a bit thicker and shorter than normal hc (after testing a bit) but not red, in my opinion.

And not branching

Interesting. I'll have to give it a try with a grinding wheel later and see. Maybe there was something wrong with the cut off wheel.

Yes try that, I tried the 01 and some 1095. The 01 had short fat orange sparks, the 1095 had, as you said, long branched orange sparks. (Didn't get a pic of that)

Perhaps my shop is more brightly lit than your own, but when I was cutting it, the sparks were nowhere near as bright as yours appear to be. They were very dull, dark almost. 

Same here. As far as I know, the chromium in the O1 tends to kill sparks. Hence they are short and dull.

Yeah you might be right my shop is not amazingly lit. Anyway, I hope it helped you. Don't think you've been conned lol.

I just ground a piece of O1. The piece that I have gives orange non branching sparks, but I would not call them short. The chemical composition of O1 does differ from different vendors, so there's that. Short red sparks sounds like stainless to me. Note that martensetic stainless is still attracted to a magnet, so you can't test for it that way.

Are you sure it is O-1? Almost sounds like HSS sparks. 

Well I welded the steel up into a Damascus billet yesterday. The welding went great, but good God was it a bugger to move under the hammer. Unless I was near welding temp, there really was no major progress being made. Maybe HSS? Not really sure. I don't think HSS likes forging, iirc. Definitely not stainless, chrome oxide probably would have inhibited welding. 

I've never had any problem moving O1 with a hammer.

Grinding disks and grinding wheels make different sparks. Wheels are carborundum throughout where disks are abrasives in a phenolic resin matrix, you can smell the difference when you use them. The sparks can be very different.

Different abrasives in belts can make different spark color and patterns too.

At one time a spark test was pretty darned accurate but with new grinding media, not so much.

Frosty The Lucky.

Frosty

Thanks for the information. Strangely enough, the spark looked almost the same between a disk and a wheel. The wheel produced a few long sparks every once in a while however. It may just be that I'm looking too far into it, idk. We all see colors differently.

You bet. I only just remembered when it came up in this thread. I noticed a long time ago and started comparing everything to my wheel grinder. There's also the human eye to distort things to what the brain expects to see and tells that super fast camera eyeballs to adjust to. A color photography class will go a long way to showing how much differently everybody sees colors, brightness, shadows, etc. It makes it a lot harder to learn to judge color by reading than having someone show you.

The differences in individual human site came up in another thread just today. These thoughts seem to travel in: packs, flocks, schools . . .?

Frosty The Lucky. 

I've noticed that O1 spark tests differently than 10-series high carbon steel.  The sparks seemed closer to how mild steel behaves.