Thread: Re-using Sheffield Steel?

Originally Posted by RezDog

I have done very little forge work. However when I was in high school the metal shop students made the chisels for the wood shop. I made a set of lathe chisels. It seems to me that when we did the heat tempered the chisels we heated the steel until the magnet would not stick and then quenched it in oil. It seems to me that we did that twice though. I have no idea what we were using for steel though.
Someone that actually knows what they are talking about will likely set us straight on this.

Standard wood chisels are usually made out of O1 or A2 steel. Personally, I prefer the O1.

I was going through my accumulated junk here yesterday when I came across a good sized bundle of blades that are beyond repair, so the thought of trying to forge them into a billet returned. Just thought I'd check to see if any of you played around with this at all over the last year?

I remember watching a video posted on SRP about rusty steel wire rope being turned into beautiful pattern-welded steel. I'm sure something similar can be done with a few antique blades. Please post your pix as soon as you're done.

I think if I needed to make a new razor out of a bunch of old razors, id do a canned sanmai construction. with as thin as the ground portion of the old razors are, I think you would lose that steel almost immediately if you were to try to a forge weld them to scale. then there is not knowing what the old razors were and how to heat treat steel from them.

so I would make a can, then pack as many old razors as I had in that can, and then fill it with 1084 powder, weld a lid on, and then forge weld the can. then peel the can off, and forge the billet into a bar, and then forge weld that bar onto each side of a piece of known, clean 1095, and then make the razor from that. that way you would have the coolness of the old razor steel, with a known clean edge steel that you know how to heat treat.

I have not played with smelting steel so couldn't tell you how to do that. closest ive come to playing with that is melting iron and casting it.

I have played with forge welded cable. and while it is cool to be able to take a piece of junk wire rope and turn it into a knife, I'm not all that fond of it. the pattern to me is sort of plain, and at the end of the day you spent all that time prepping the rope, welding it, forging it out, grinding, heat treating, finishing, ect..... and what you end up with is a chunk of steel that you don't know what it has in it. when you could have started the day with good, clean, known materials and have gotten known repeatable results.

I think the issue with melting down high carbon steel is that you'll lose the carbon unless you have a way of keeping oxygen away from the steel. It ain't cast iron but you might turn it into that! So the forge-welding ideas are better but even then you have to worry about keeping scale off the steel when you heat it or it won't fuse. And if you put fully hollow-ground razors into a forge that's hot enough for forge-welding I suspect the thin parts will mostly just turn into scale or disappear at high heat; you'll just have the spine and tang. Wedges would be your best bet and you would probably need to worry a little about keeping the mating surfaces nearly flat and unoxidized (like with flux).

But, what the heck do I know, I never tried it and IANABOAM (I am not a blacksmith or a metallurgist).

The only sensible way to do it is crucible smelting.
However that is a fairly tricky and pretty dangerous process. It's not rocket science, but working with molten metal can be extremely dangerous if you go into it without knowledge or experience.

I should have clarified - I would be going down the pattern welded billet road, not smelting. I was nervous enough melting down some copper and aluminium in my forge. No way I'm stepping up to molten iron until I have some idea as to what I'd be doing.