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View Full Version : A Boeing engineer on steel:



rebel
04-25-2010, 03:15 PM
This guy has a lot of experience with different steels and a couple things I got out of it for knife construction were:

1. If you don't know the carbon content of the steel you can do a spark test. You can touch your steel to the grinder and see what kind of spark it has. A yellow spark has less carbon than a white spark.

2. Some steels, due to molecular alignment, need to be annealed two or three times to make them workable.

I thought it was good information to pass along.

crashdive123
04-25-2010, 03:57 PM
Thanks Rebel. Canid has talked about the spark test in the past as well. Good stuff.

panch0
04-25-2010, 10:51 PM
Thanks rebel, I had heard that somewhere before, or something similar.

canid
04-26-2010, 02:00 PM
i would add that many alloying metals will change the character of the sparks.