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I Forge Iron

Is this shear steel?


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Whats up guys, Yesterday i went out to my secret wagon grave yard (south shore mass) to grab some wrought iron wheel bands and poke around with a metal detector to see if there was anything else i wanted. I grabed a large band that was wrough,t an axle wich i haven't cut into yet and a set of leaf springs. When i broke of the last bit of my cut in the leaf spring it broke like the wrought inron wheel, not as stringy but looked wrought to me until i started to grind it, the sparks were not like wrought iron at all. the first two pictures are of the leaf spring and the next two are of the wheel band for comparison and the last is the three pieces i found, the axle is 7 feet long. I have been metal detecting this area for a wile and have found alot of item i can date from 1650 to mid 1800 but mostly 1700s - early 1800s if thats any help. 

 

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Lawrence, im no expert, but As Thomas said good chance of blister steel, which you probably know was the first step from wrought to shear steel. The more the carbon is homogenized throughought and the silicon driven out, you move through blister, shear, double shear, etc. Shear steel was considerably more expensive and generally only used if the lower cost blister steel wouldn’t do the job, just as plain wrought was used as opposed to blister if it could get the job done. I’d imagine small highly stressed springs such as used in clocks and gun actions would be shear steel, where as larger thicker springs that experienced less deflection could survive being made of less refined blister. Also, the wrought picked for any steel making would be of the highest grade the maker could afford to source.

Anyways congrats on sourcing all this old iron and steel.

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