How to identify wrought iron!

look up look way up those of you were old enough to remember that show welcome to the old guys club so question came up from my video the other day about whether or not the material i was working on was or was not right on on the left hand side closest to the camera is a piece of the harrow on the right hand side furthest from the camera is a piece of known mild steel and i'm going to show you the test the destructive test for determining whether or not material is wrought iron or mild steel and i will show you with this piece unfortunately it's 5 8 square that's all i had uh of wrought iron i'll show you what real wrought iron looks like when you break it so what i've done is i've taken the saw and i've cut halfway through the material and i'm now going to break it off and we're going to look at the break to see what the structure of the material looks like and determine whether or not we have wrought iron or mild steel good test to do on any steel you might find if you're hoping that it's wrought iron yeah this will determine it for you this one will be easy i got a lot of handle here to work with so this is a piece of the harrow so you can see it's got a grain like sand the structure of the material when it breaks it looks like sand um known mild steel again a little bit more elongation in that material held together a little bit better than the old stuff but remember this harrow is probably over 100 years old so steel industries changed a little bit since then and the purity of the steel has probably changed a ton since then i think most of today's mild steel is made from a lot of recycled material so again the grain structure on the break looks like very very fine sand here's the wrought iron [Applause] so okay can you see that it looks like wood it's much more malleable and it's layered its construction is layers and those layers want to separate when it comes to forging wrought iron you're gonna see that if you work at too cold a temperature it does just this it tries to separate and it cracks so i hope that helps wrought iron uh the other thing you'll notice about rod iron you'll grab another piece there's a nice big chunk of rod end when it weathers like this has you can see lines the grain structure is in parallel lines and it'll often rot away leaving really obvious striations that's another indication that you're dealing with wrought iron and not mild steel anyways that's all for today guys hopefully that helps clear that up and uh helps you on your quest to find some wrought iron for a special project save it for just that though uh broad iron is no longer produced i think there may be a company that recycles raw down and creates bar stock from it but for the most part wrought iron is no longer available except for salvaged material so if you're going to repurpose a piece of wrought iron think hard about what it is you're going to make out of it and it should have some meaning i think i made a coat rack for my neighbor who gave me some wrought iron from her original homestead building that she unfortunately had to tear down log home it had a tie bar in it that held it together and i used the pieces of that tie bar to create hooks for a coat rack and i made nails and made her a coat rack for her house that incorporated some of that rod iron material and the barn board so that she had a piece of it still even after tearing it down that she could speak to and that seemed like a special project to me so it was a worthwhile cause for that wrought iron all right take care guys like and subscribe and we'll talk again soon

Channel: C. Johnston Blacksmith

Views: 2,633

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Id: ATCXQtVMokk

Length: 5min 54sec (354 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2022