Old plane irons..

[Mike Henderson]

This is a fantastic thread. We can all have different opinions,and it's great to hear them discussed.

I agree with Mike that we have the capability of producing far better steel now than in the past. I think most people would probably agree with this. The big question is do we? Does it make economical sense for the manufacturers?

Being far from an expert, I'll stop talking, and keep listening.....

Michael

Remember that the steel produced back in the 18th Century was plain carbon steel, with little control over other elements in the mix (and poor control over the amount of carbon). Almost any modern steel, including plain carbon steel, is better than the 18th Century steel, when viewed in the aggregate.

Until the development of the crucible process, steel generally meant case hardening or blister steel, neither of which is uniform in the carbon content throughout the metal (not homgeneous). I checked the book "History of the British Iron and Steel Industry" by Schubert last night. He commented that the crucible process was not used to any degree by steelmakers until about 1770, and by 1787 it was well established (page 330). The crucible process was invented in about 1740-1742.

I also believe that most of what people think is 18th Century steel is actually 19th Century steel. By then the crucible process, and the Industrial Revolution, was in full swing and steelmakers were better able to control their process. But we have evidence that even by mid 19th Century the steel produced from batch to batch was not consistent (US Armory complaint about variation between shipments of steel. And the government paid top dollar for steel.)

Mike

[Dave Anderson NH]

I am learning and re-learning a lot from this thread with its disagreements. I'm proud of the way you folks are keeping things on an even keel and are able to differ without resorting to name calling and invective. This is the way contentious topics should always be discussed.... without rancor.

[Mike Henderson]

There's a second side to making a good tool and that's in the heat treatment. Great steel with poor heat treatment equals a poor tool.

But that's a discussion for another day.

Mike

[Stephen Shepherd]

But we have evidence that even by mid 19th Century the steel produced from batch to batch was not consistent (US Armory complaint about variation between shipments of steel. And the government paid top dollar for steel.)

Mike

Mike,

What was the price of steel in the mid nineteenth century? And do you know the price of wrought iron at the time period?

Stephen

[josh bjork]

Actually, when you can find a 100 year old woody in decent shape, it probably didn't work right or at least it wasn't anyone's favorite tool because the favorite tool would have been worn out from use.

[Mike Henderson]

Mike,

What was the price of steel in the mid nineteenth century? And do you know the price of wrought iron at the time period?

Stephen

I have seen some prices in some of the books I have on the history of iron and steel. But consider the process of making cast steel:

Wrought iron made from special Swedish ore (low phosphorous) is put in an airtight stone container with charcoal and heated in a furnace for about a week. This makes blister steel. The blister steel is cut into small pieces and put into crucibles with other materials (flux) and heated until the steel melts. The output is "cast steel". So the difference in price would reflect the cost to make the blister steel (wrought iron, fuel, and labor), and the crucible steel (blister steel, fuel, and labor), plus the loss and waste in the process, plus the capital cost of the furnaces (depreciation), plus a profit for the makers.

A crucible had to be small enough that a man could pull the crucible from the furnace by himself (by hand) - see attached picture of a "puller" pulling a crucible from a furnace (note the steam coming from the wet rags wrapped around his legs and arms -OSHA wasn't around in those days). So each crucible only made about 100 pounds of cast steel - but even then, pullers were big guys. The guy who poured the iron into the mold was called the teemer and the process of pouring was called teeming (I'm going from memory here so I might be wrong or have it spelled wrong).

Additionally, in the United States for most of the 19th Century, it was generally accepted that the best cast steel was from Sheffield, so you also had the shipping cost to get the cast steel here. But the wrought iron used was local iron.

So I would expect to see cast steel be significantly more expensive than wrought iron, especially wrought iron made from domestic ores instead of Swedish ore.

Mike

[The problem of phosphorous is one that plagued iron and steel makers until the 20th Century - phosphorous made iron and steel brittle. Bessemer used cast iron from Swedish ore in his process initially because the steel made from domestic cast iron was not good. Bessemer steel was okay for railroad rails but was not acceptable for other uses because of phosphorous levels. Architects specified open hearth steel and would not use Bessemer steel. Carnegie got a contract to provide a beam for a building in Chicago (Carnegie used the Bessemer process). When the beam arrived in Chicago (by rail) it was two beams - the beam had fractured in shipment. After that, no builder would use Bessemer steel in a high rise building.]

[Mike Henderson]

Here's a quote from "Steelmaking before Bessemer" by K.C. Barraclough. He's quoting Harry Brearley, a steelmaker:

"It goes without saying that a man who can lift a pot containing sixty pounds of molten steel with a pair of thongs from a furnace below ground level at a dazzling white heat is no weakling. I say "lift" but the pot is not lifted; to call men "lifters" instead of "pullers-out" would be insulting. The actual pulling out is like Macbeth's job: "when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly"... The pot is soft and in a degree yielding... The feeling of "give" gives him the confidence to straighten his back and with an unbroken pull and swing to set the pot on the floorplates. His ends of the tongs are held together by his hands only; he might use a ring to hold them together but by doing so his sense of feeling would dissappear and the contact between him and the pot would be less intimate."

So I guess a crucible only held 60 pounds of steel. And the guy was called a "puller-out".

Mike

[Larry Williams]

...Remember that the crucible process (cast steel) wasn't even invented until the mid 18th century. [update: I checked in the book "History of the British Iron and Steel Industry" by Schubert and he says that crucible steel was not really adopted by the steelmakers until about 1770, even though it was invented earlier (page 330).] Prior to that all you had was blister steel.

Heat treating was done completely "by eye" with significant variations between batches.

Many people in our society have the attitude that "if it's old, it must be good." The reality is that we have made tremendous progress in all of the technological areas of our society, including metallurgy. ... The same thing is true of modern metals and heat treating.

Mike,

Sorry for going back and picking up one of your earlier post but it contains things you've repeated here a couple times and one thing I disagree pretty strongly with.

First, the cementation (crucible steel) process was invented by 1601 but likely earlier. K. C. Barraclough in Steelmaking before Bessemer, London: The Metals Society, c. 1984, explains that a 1574 treatise from Prague mentions a process which could be interpreted as a description of the cementation process. He also wrote that 1601 first documented use of the cementation process in Nuremburg, developed by John Nussbaum (who had spent some time in Prague). "The first plant for the production of steel by this method was built by Die Gesellschaft der Stahl Invention and Kunst (The Company of Steel Invention and Art).

His dissertation also states that by 1617 the cementation process was patented in England, though practical production of steel seems to have begun in the 1620's. And production of steel by the cementation process began in Sheffield about 1650, mostly on a fairly small scale until the early part of the 18th century.

While I agree those involved back then didn't understand steel on a molecular level, they did have a lot of practical experience. They knew what made good steel and they knew the properties that caused problems. Joseph Moxon's late 1600's Mechinick Exercises identifies Great Britain's only iron mining areas with iron ore pure enough to produce quality steel. Neither could supply the demand and Britain turned to importing Swedish iron. Those making steel were fracture testing the ingots and knew that the steel even varied in quality within ingots. Barraclough explains that Shear steel was introduced into England by John Bertram, who was shipwrecked on the North Durham coast in 1693. Within two years he was in charge of steel making at a furnace in Newcastle, from where he introduced shear steel. The making of shear steel was introduced into Sheffield in 1767. Shear steel involves cutting ingots slices according to its quality and carbon content.

They knew what grain was too. material is In a letter dated Sept. 10, 1709 (Published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1710 (vol. 26) Antony Van Leeuwenhoek wrote:

" ... Iron or Steel, the fine Particles that compose which, we
can only discover in the broken Gaps or Notches of a Razor,
for instance, and the greater and courser [coarser] the Parts
are, of which those Metals are composed, as we may see in
Cast-Iron, the less valuable are the said Metals; but the finer
the Particles are, the more valuable in my Opinion will be the
Steel and Iron which they compose."

He was examining metals and cutting edges under a 200 power microscope. He also explained his sharpening and the abrasives used. This was 300 years ago and some people think a web site doing the same thing today is doing revolutionary work? I learned a few things from Van Leeuwenhoek's letter but I'll keep Dave happy and avoid comment on the value of the contemporary effort.

You mentioned the Government documents complaining of variation in steel. That's nothing new and it continues today. Someday, if you get a chance and have time to listen to a rant, ask Ron Hock how much money a small business can lose to a batch of bad steel. A couple weeks ago I was at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks and heard similar complaints from a guy hardness testing irons.

Your comment I disagree with most, though, was; " Heat treating was done completely "by eye" with significant variations between batches." I've heat treated a lot of irons. We have both a completely manual method and a computer controlled furnace. Because of the variation in steel, I'm absolutely confident I can heat treat more accurately by eye. The furnace operates according to average carbon/alloy content and an average critical temperature. Steel goes through physical changes at critical temperature that cause a dramatically visible indication at critical temperature. Heat treating by eye is doing each item one at a time, I believe problems with whole batches is more the domain of mass production.

One comment you made did make me smile. You seem to favor Japanese tools like chisels. The best of those are made with steel about as close as you can get to old-style high carbon steel. They're made and heat treated one at a time, by eye and by a skilled craftsman relying on a life-time of experience, knowledge and observation. By your arguments in this thread, one might have expected you to favor modern mass-produced Marples chisels with their modern chrome-vanadium steel that produces those folding edges I once struggled with.

[Mike Henderson]

I think you're getting the cementation process and crucible steel confused. They are very different processes and were invented at different times. In fact, Barraclough's Steelmaking before Bessemer is actually two volumes - the first on the cementation process (blister steel)and the second on crucible steel. You can also check wikipedia, here and here.

In the east, the crucible process was invented much earlier (in India - wootz steel) but I was only addressing western steel and processes.

The main point I've been trying to make is that our iron and steel making ancestors did not have the ability to produce consistent metal, and did not know why one batch was good and another bad. The books on the history of iron and steel give many examples of enterprises which failed because they could not produce acceptable metal. Additionally, the books point out that some batches of metal were discarded as unusable - for example, the output of the blast furnace was contaminated to a degree that the pig could not be refined into wrought iron. The forgemaster simply could not explain why one batch was good and another bad. They learned from experience and tried to do the same thing when they had a good batch but often, the input changed and the same process would not work.

The example of the US Armory was just an example - the history books speak over and over about lack of consistancy in output, based on complaints in contemporaneous documents. And it makes sense that there would be lots of variation since the iron and steel makers could not measure what was in their inputs and depended upon human skill to control the process.

I appreciate your comments and views on heat treating.

I'm not an advocate of Japanese chisels. I tried them but find them too hard and fragile. I do agree that the process of making them is traditional and harks back to 18th Century methods, although the carbon steel used is modern.

Mike

[Stephen Shepherd]

What type of steel or iron was used in early ( 18th century) planes? Seems that if the material wasn't as high tech as our new stuff, they'd be sharpening alot more often.

It was very interesting, I just wondered if your question was answered?

Stephen

[Larry Williams]

Mike,

I hadn't had any experience with shear steel so making a judgment is difficult. I remedied that.

We have an old smooth plane that's part of our collection. I've never been able to read the maker's mark so the maker isn't a lot of help in dating the plane. From the features, I'd say it's from about 1800.



The plane has an iron marked "F. Stones, Shear Steel." That iron was badly pitted and it's taken all my spare time for a few days to work it down to where I the pitting was gone enough to really see what the steel is like. There's still a little pitting near the edge in one corner.



My partner, Don McConnell, probably has the best data base of British edge tool and saw makers that exists so I asked him about Stones' working dates. He says Ken Roberts lists him as an edge tool maker in Sheffield starting in 1817. Don adds, "Saw maker and joiners' tool maker by 1821. Latest working date I currently have is 1849."



It took a while to abrade the pitting away. After I had portions of the edge free from pitting, to take a break, I stopped several times to raise a wire edge on the iron. The flattening process and the wire edge can tell you a lot about the steel. I found no inclusions that would suggest impurities in the steel. It was even more uniform in color than the modern steels I usually work with. The wire edge was fine, crisp and uniform every time. The fineness and rigidity of the wire edge tells me the steel is very fine grained. As to hardness, it worked a lot like the steels I usually use and I would guess it would test out about RC-62/63. The laid on steel is to thin to actually do a Rockwell hardness test.

After I had the majority of the pitting removed and could get a decent edge, I put it in the plane and took quite a few shaving. The edge held up as well as any steel, old or modern, I have at my disposal. I could still shave my arm after removing about 1/8" from a 12" long piece of beech.

My impression is that this is some very fine grained good steel. I'd eagerly trade any of my Marples, Two Cherries, or A-2 edge tools I have for ones made of shear steel if this is a reasonable example of shear steel. I wouldn't hesitate to put my name on it and use it in any plane we make if I could get a supply of it.

I had a lot more to say about old and modern practices but this is already too long. I think I'll forget that for now.

[Mike Henderson]

I'm going from memory here, but what I recall is that shear steel is made from the output of the cementation process. The strips of blister steel were stacked and forge welded together to make shear steel. If it was then folded over and forged welded again, it was called double shear steel. [added note: I found this site which is a glossary of metal working terms.]

The problem with blister steel, and, of course, shear steel since it was made from blister steel, is that the carbon content is not homogenous - the steel has areas of high carbon and areas of low carbon. That's the reason crucible steel was developed - to make a more homogeneous steel. Our ancestors certainly thought crucible steel was better than shear steel because the industry converted to crucible steel (cast steel) fairly quickly - even though crucible steel added an additional step in the process (which would have made it more expensive).

Different subject: Our ancestors were well able to recognize good iron and steel after it was made. They had a number of tests which they could run to determine the quality of the iron and steel. The problem was that they could not produce good iron and steel consistently.

So think about the interaction between a steel maker and a user (buyer)

Buyer: "That steel you shipped me last time was terrific. I'd like to order some more."

Steel maker: "We were careful to note the ores we used, the flux, and we'll have the same artisan at the furnace. I'm sure we'll be able to deliver the same steel to you next month."

A month later:

Buyer: "What is this garbage you sent me? Did I not pay you the best price? Why did you ship me your worse steel?"

Steel maker: "We made it exactly the same way with the same ore and flux. But the furnace is a fickle mistress and did not cooperate. I'm sure we can do better with the batch we ship you next month."

Buyer: "Next month??? With this garbage I may not be in business next month. Make sure you ship me good steel or I won't be around to buy from you."

Some people might say "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose" but it was a lot worse back then. If an 18th Century steel user (buyer) was given access to our modern steels he'd think he had died and gone to heaven.

Mike

[Wiley Horne]

Larry and Mike,

Thanks for a great thread! Hoping for even more....

Larry, that is a magnificent post you just made on the shear steel example you have in hand. Specific examples and actual data are just stunning. It's so rare.

Wiley

[Johnny Kleso]

I'm going to add my two cents...

Steel is dirt cheap these days since Bessemer process days, before them they would take small marble size pieces and hammer then on and anvil working it into a bigger piece one marble at a time..

These is lot of great steel made to day, D-2 or A-2 can shear a plate of CRS 1" thick and pop out a man hole size disk in one shot..

I'm sure you could build a die with older cast steel and do any type of a production run and have it last..

The older steel is closer to todays W-1 and 0-1 with a finer grain and takes a sharper edge...

The CPM metals (powered) are like the A-2 and D-2 but have the finer grain like 0-1 and W-1
I have not ran any tests on these CPM steels but this is what somone needs to make a blade out of and test it...

The sales Rep at Crucial says CPM V-10 is the Best WW Steel..........................................

Someone needs to buy a piece and test it...

Larry,
You should call Crucial and ask for a free test sample of harden piece of V-10 to test in a single bladed Coffin Plane, the most they can say is NO..

_________________________________
Here's a challenge for you. I'd like to buy one of the most common steels, O-1, in the fully spheroidized bars. I want a steel mill to just pull some from their production before it goes to be "precision ground." It's normal production but I want to buy it before the last step in their production schedule. I know of a much bigger company than mine that would like the same thing. Before grinding, they cut their bars in 3' lengths but I'd even take 10' lengths. I don't want any unusual sizes or anything, in fact, the sizes I'm looking for are some of the most common sold -- 1/8" and 3/16" by 2" will work to begin with. Let me know when you find it and the size of the order I'd need to place.
___________________________________________

Back in the 80s you could buy steel what ever size you wanted but you had to place a MILL RUN Order, a meer 2 Tons and 4140 was about $1.75- $2.25 a LB back them.. Most steel sellers are good with giving credit though..

There is also rolling mills that will squeeze roll your stock to any size..

If you can find someone to Water Jet to cut the parts to shape like on H&Rs you can can sell the drop outs back to the mill as certified scrap to be melted and turned around again... Must be pieces though can not chips...

[Mike Henderson]

The best evidence we have for the quality of steel made in the 18th and 19th Centuries is the decisions made, and actions taken, by our ancestors. As iron and steel making technology changed, our ancestors embraced the changes. And they only embraced a change if it allowed them to make better tools, which would contribute to their success in the market. They were rational business people. Someone who argues that old steel is better has the burden of explaining why our ancestors, who were making their decisions in the face of real business and market pressures, moved to more modern steels.

Mike

[Of course, we also need to define what "good steel" is. I define good steel as that steel which best meets the needs of the customer. That includes the total cost of ownership. So steel that lasted longer in use, say on a metal lathe, might be "better" if its additional cost was less than the cost to stop work and change the tool.]