Mystery metal help

Y

Yugami

Joined
Oct 13, 2015
Messages
102
I never thought I would post one of these but apparently I have a different metal in my stash.

I have a whole bucket (like a large trash can to keep it organized) of 4' long rounds of various sizes that was secured from an old industrial supply house back store room. The ends are painted - yellow = oil red = water. but I found a green 1/2" round. And just for fun tried it out.

It forged in less than 1/2 the time than the oil hardening steel. normally it takes me a couple passes to get it squished down to about a rough 1/4" when I start the rest of the forming. I did this one in two (one for the part without the tongs then flip)

It had a light white oxide layer that glowed a weird yellow when the steel was orange and at one point it flashed off while forging (bright flare shots, not normal sparks)

I'm wondering if it wasn't just a different type of water hardening steel as I haven't tried forging any of the red ends yet just yellow.
 
You can make an educated guess with a spark test, or quench it then try to break it, but short of sending it to a lab, there's just not gonna be enough info to identify anything definitively.
 
I think Andrew is right. Color codes are not standard and are even painted on by distributors as an internal check system.
 
So the steel is pretty "standard" tool steels Oil is an O1, water is a W2 - I guess I'm wondering if A2 or other standard Air hardening steel forges easier than O1.

Lets start with the assumption that it forges much easier than O1 and is a easy to source non knife specific or anything extra fancy.
 
doubt it is A2.. I'd probably just thin some of the stock out, heat it up to non-mag and quench it in water or oil.. see if it even gets hard.. Go from there..
 
How sure are you that the other rounds are O1 and W2? Is that what you were told they were, or is that a guess?

As for the steel in question: Do you have a hardness tester or some hardness files?
You will probably never know exactly what kind of steel it is, but you can at least cut a couple of samples off of it and do some "standard" heat treating and quenching on it. Bend it, break it, check grain, check hardness, etc...
 
I know they're O1 and W2 - I used to know the mill but its been a number of years and I didn't write it down. I seem to remember a side note on the coloring code mentioning green but I don't remember what it said.

I forged a knife out of it. I'll quench in oil like its O1 and see what happens.
 
Just a guess but your green tipped rods sound like what you would see with galvanized mild steel rods.
 
When I have an unknown metal, I head over to the local scrap/salvage yard and ask them. Nearly all have a hand held analyzer/spectrometer and can tell exact composition in a few seconds. Might give it a try!
 
Thats a good idea, I didn't think about them having those. Saw a demo of one a few years back, amazing stuff.

I heated it up in the forge and stuck it in cold canola oil (crudest heat treat). Definitely got hard; slight decarb layer but a normal file will not cut it past that.

Good cause the knife turned our really nice. I'm going to anneal it and start finishing and do some thermal cycles etc and do it up like O1 and see what happens.
 
I had a similar problem before. The machine shop i worked for had a bunch of "mystery green" flat stock too. I looked on several color charts from different manufacturers and there was a pattern, but not set code. Green: 1018hr, 304ss, 932bronze. but i did come across a couple that said it was 01. Im pretty sure a universal color chart does not exist. So unless you can find out who the manufacturer was, id go with what everyone else was saying; test it yourself or get it tested. Good Luck!
 
Been googling around to try and find hand held spectrometers to study the subject, but I haven't had much success. Any leads as to search terms?
 
I dug around the bin I store them in looking for something else and found a a set of 5/16" rod with green ends and an actual label attached to it. It is W1

man that stuff forges easy compared to the O1
 
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