Well, if it makes you feel better, the result of working irons by yourself from an annealed state is usually an acceptable iron that isn't as good as any commercially made piece of gear. And annealing an iron and rehardening it often doesn't do great things for it - it's OK once - but doing it repeatedly is probably not good because you, me and everyone else in the open atmosphere doesn't have the ability to heat the iron to critical and relieve all of its stresses and really control the temperature. I think the product of repeated annealing and rehardening is large grains or lots of internal stresses.
Still, put that iron in the oven and see if you can get a little bit of straw color on it, and then try it on the stones. That part is perfectly safe and should only improve an iron that is otherwise unusable.