Thread: Sheffield steel superiority

Originally Posted by AKmik

Think about your favorite grandmothers cooking, you think she makes the best apple pie in the world. If your grandma left the same ingredients on the counter for your wife to make you that favorite apple pie...well , there could be a lot of variation. Now if she shared the secrets of 60 years in the kitchen with your wife and taught her, that pie is now not so hard to duplicate.

Unfortunately, even the recipe would not guarantee the the same results. There are still a huge amount of variables.

It's not *just* the ingredients, it is how you handle them. Grinding a piece of tool steel will produce a different result than first forging it. In the 1800s forging would depend on the skill of the smith, how quickly, how many strikes of the hammer, the coal in the forge used for heating, exactly at what temperature was the blank pulled out of the forge.. Just heat treating is a small part of the whole process. Today we heat soak, cryogenic treat etc.... but in the 1800s there was no such thing, not even accurate thermometers for those temperatures... just the seat of the pants of the workmen and their experience.

Going back to Grandma and her apple pie... What apples, how ripe, who's butter, how well dried was it... how much salt in the butter, or perhaps there was none at all... How were the apples cut, thickness etc. and then there's the flour, how damp was it, how finely milled, did the mill that made the flour include any extra ingredients, was it stone ground or some other method, how was the dough handled, we know less is more, but depending on the temperature, humidity, weather and time of the day, they can all influence how you handle the dough that particular time/day. ( I won't even go to the fact that finding those ingredients, made the same way, would be almost impossible to find today... even Apple orchards and the apples they grow have changed significantly in the past 60 years).

Someone brought up poor quality steel... it probably had the right mix of ingredients, but the foundry was careless in how they handled it, or perhaps they did not have the right knowledge to produce that grade of steel, and ended up with microscopic air bubbles, then again, sometimes it's not even about the knowledge, but rather it's being produced to a price point. If you don't want to pay for quality, you don't get it. I remember when they began to copy US made woodworking machinery in the far East. It was terrible quality as some workers simply took apart US made machines and used those parts to make molds, not worrying (or perhaps even knowing) about the fact that cast iron shrinks and you need to make your molds slightly larger to accommodate that fact. Later, the same companies, now having learned how to do things properly, began to complain that the buyers would not pay for the extra work required to make a quality product... The buyers wanted the cheap stuff because they could make a better profit.

I do get a bit cranky when I'm told "our products only use virgin steel".... Sorry, but iron oxide dug out of the ground is NOT virgin steel. It's what you do with your ingredients that matters... if you start with old cars, it's a lot cleaner than ore.... but if you just melt them down without doing the rest of the work, you'll end up with a poor product, just as you would if you started from plain ore which is also full of contaminates.

So, I don't think it's a magical ingredient (one rusty old razor would give you all the information required if analyzed in a modern foundry's lab), I just think the workers of the day took pride in their skills and they just did the best they knew how at the time.

Regards

Christian