Rust prevention

K

Kevin the grey

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Aug 26, 2005
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I saw a picture of a blacksmith rust proofing a metal axle with cow horn . He rubbed the cow horn on the hot metal and it almost seened to liquify and spread itself out on the surface of the metal . Almost the same way a thin penetrating oil will migrate over a surface .

Liquify may be a subjective term . There was a bit of smoke as you can imagine and I only saw it for a few seconds . Does anyone know of this and would it work on knife/axe blades ?
 
Kevin
I use a lot of cow horn, and have never heard of this. I'm not sure it would work that way. Cow horn is basically hair, and I have never seen it liquify under heat. It will burn and smells really bad.
I'll give it a try next time I get some steel red hot.
Bill
 
Yeah, but you'd probably destroy the temper heating them up. Not sure how hot you'd have to get it. Not sure if it is a mechanical coating or if the horn just gives the surface a little bit of a nitride treatment (there is nitrogen in horn... the Romans made potassium ferrocyanide salts by heating hoofs & horns with blood in iron kettles)
 
àthis was on a program where a medeval blacksmith was making an axle for a wheel in a man powered crane .

It was hard to see . Not much cow horn was burned nor did he touch the whole piece . That was what led me to believe it spread itself out in some kind of gaseous or liquid form . The entire surface did seem different after the treatment . This guy was quite proficient and the engineer in charge of the project would presumably have his choice of blacksmiths .
 
Interesting. I wonder if, as Bill suggests, there was oil in the horn, and he was oil-bluing the surface?

I don't believe horn will liquify, just burn. I know that horn, as well as animal bone and hide, was used for case hardening in "the old days" so obviously these guys were pretty creative and did some experimenting. Maybe carbon from the horn had some effect on the metal surface, though I doubt from what you describe that you'd get any appreciable hardening, maybe just some rust-resistant oxide.
 
No I am fairly certain it was the horn itself . Some gases are heavier than air and so may creep along a surface mimicking a liquid . There also may be an affinity between one and the other . This is pure speculation on my part .

It will be something to remember and further my education with .
 
No, horn and hoofs and tortise shell are all keratin and it will melt before it vaporizes and catches fire.
 
Keratin is hair. There is a very fine point at which it "melts" before it burns up.
It actually just starts breaking down and immediately burns. Wiping a piece of horn on hot steel does nothing for the steel, and it stinks. That's all, as far as I know.
Bill
 
Perhaps there _was_ an oil treatment/residue on the horn.. the resulting carbon/oil compound from the burned horn oil/grease resulted in grahite-like material for lubrication.
That or some kind of preservative. Just a thought.

Jim L.
 
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