New to blacksmithing? Read this

One caution.... you're building essentially a ramjet engine. Too little gas flow can lead to too much internal pressure and WHOOOOOMP!. If there are specific assembly instructions, follow them to the letter, then stand waaaaay back the first time you fire it up.

Charly

Congratulations, you are the proud owner of a chunk of slag. I had a couple of chunks when I was a kid. Got 'em from the slag heap at a copper smelter (Bisbee? Morenci?).

Your verbal description popped up a 40 year old memory; I can see those pieces as clearly as if I were holding them now. Now, where did I put my car keys?

He gave a helluva demonstration at the CBA spring conference last year.

- ken

I started out using briquettes. It didn't work very well, and I certainly couldn't have welded with them, but a bunch in a chimney-style starter will get steel hot enough to forge.

- ken

Sounds cool as anything! :)

And not all that tedious finishing work and second guessing the fickle market and traveling to shows, either I suppose. :)

Where do you advertize, Charly?

As far as being sunburnt, I -stayed- sunburnt from early April to late October -every year- and didn't make even $40 an hour. :)

What do you think GA? :)

Alvin in AZ

Ok. If it were iron slag such as you might expect to find near the railroad tracks would it not be magnetically reactive? It appears to be more mineral than metallic. If it is slag I should be able to heat up a piece and pound on it without breaking it right?

GA

Far out! Exploding stuff. Doesn't it need a decent source of oxygen to do that? The design pretty much creates a sealed environment that precludes oxygen... At least after the first little while.

GA

It has occured to me that just making stuff like pattern welded steel and Mokume stock has more dollar per hour value than making knives. I'm guessing it would feel more like plain work after a short time though. Not something you'd want to do for a business without a big machine hammer either. It'd be worth your time to make extra if you were gonna do it though, even if retail is not your intent.

GA

Well since I already have a job and my hobby ambitions include forge welding I figure I'll know what I'm doing in say... ten more years or so ;-) I'm thinking if I ever get to the point where I know my stuff and I get thoroughly sick of playing the high tech game, I'll start trying to make an income from blade smithing and related things. Preferably after the 401K plan has had a chance to grow a bit.

GA

Mine was mostly glass and crud. It shouldn't be magnetic--they kept the good stuff and threw out the slag. There will be _some_ iron in it, if it came from an iron smelter, cuz no separation is ever 100%. (First or Second Law of Thermodynamics, I don't remember which.) Hot or cold, I expect your chunk to smash into little pieces if you whack it. Try it, see if my guess is correct.

Are we having a definition problem with the word "slag"? I'm using it to mean the non-metallic waste product from a smelter. There might be other meanings of the word that I don't know about. The word I use for bubbly rocks found along RR tracks is "clinker;" crud left over after the coal burned in the loco.

I don't advertize, word of mouth keeps me as busy as I care to be. I've got a permanent sunburn on my neck, it never goes away, so I guess that's my proof that I'm a real Redneck. I tried advertizing ONCE, made back about half of my investment. Waste of money. My rig takes about 20 minutes to get to heat, and I can cook two pieces of cable at a time. The hammer has custom dies, so I get a thickness and width dimensioned billet out. It'll turn two feet of cable into two feet of billet in about ten minutes. Two feet of billet makes a really nice short sword, or a pair of knives.

Charly

So what do you want for said two foot billet of welded cable? And what's the composition of the metal?

GA (yeah, interested)

I have about a half ton of slag that we made some years ago (while trying to make iron blooms) buried out back. It looks a lot like what you describe. But it really IS just another ROCK. All we did was to turn one knid of ore into another kind of ore. Sometimes magnetic, sometimes not.

Pete Stanaitis

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Greyangel wrote:

I would consider "slag" to be anything that drips off of melting material and runs off onto the ground. Like a byproduct of torch cut steel? Anyway I plan to whack a chunk off and get it really hot - just to see how it behaves.

GA

I'm not enough geologist to make an educated opinion. The stuff I got really does seem more like rock than metal. Heavy stuff though - expecially considering its got lots of bubble holes in it. Meteoric material comes to mind but it's probably something far more mundane.

GA

Remember, the difference between rock and metal is often Oxides, silicates, sulfur(s) and the like. Likely some of the flux used on top to keep oxygen from spoiling the mix.

Various fluorides are likely in the wild and maybe in the flux.

The glassy surface is from the various chemicals generated at that temperature and mix.

Mart> I'm not enough geologist to make an educated opinion. The stuff I got

Sounds good to me, I'll buy.

GA

spoiling the mix.

I get $50 a foot for cable to billet, no folds. (Folds are extra, how much depends on how many folds.) This leaves a billet that you can still see the wires in, looking rather like a piece of rope that's been run over by a truck. The wire is oilrig draw wire, so it's probably 1095, 7X19 extra flexible @ 1.5 " dia. . It will harden up past 'file hard' in water, and to 'file hard' in oil. I have a blade that has held a hair popping sharp edge for eight years, so it 's got some carbon in it. I know it's damn tough, think about how much five miles of thickwall drill string weighs. It ends up right at .300" thick by not quite 1.75" wide, which seems to be a good starting point for knives. It forges nicely at low orange, and doesn't exibit any narsty 'memory', like the 6160 axle stock did. Leave me an email, we can work something out.

Charly

Thanks Charley! I'm gonna keep it on the resource burner for now. I'm slow and already deep into a current project.

GA