Steel Dust

The "dust" used in canister damascus is new steel in a powder form, not something swept up off the floor. I think it was Phillip Patton who used drill-press swarf; in that case he was dealing with "pure" steel as well (I would guess he had to burn the residual cutting oil off it first).
 
James_Terrio said:
Are you like me and sometimes wonder if there's some use for steel dust?
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If it's carbon steel dust, you can always let it rust, add oxidized aluminum dust, and make thermite. :eek:

(Your estate can decide what to do with what's left of your knife making stuff. :rolleyes:)
 
real good looking knives. I have always assumed the grinding dust was contaminated. But I keep all my band saw shavings separated. Haven't used the high carbon saw shavings yet, but I have done a melt with brass shavings that worked well.
 
AllenMcB said:
If it's carbon steel dust, you can always let it rust, add oxidized aluminum dust, and make thermite. :eek:

(Your estate can decide what to do with what's left of your knife making stuff. :rolleyes:)
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I'll remember to avoid that! I hate getting blown up :D Does grit from AO belts count? One more reason to keep the shop clean :eek:

bikermikearchery said:
real good looking knives. I have always assumed the grinding dust was contaminated. But I keep all my band saw shavings separated. Haven't used the high carbon saw shavings yet, but I have done a melt with brass shavings that worked well.
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That makes sense to me.
 
J-siah said:
well well, MR smarty pants, if the dust was not covered all weekend then there is airborne dust in there too. so his 16oz measurement is way off.
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:D Okay, that was good. :D

Actually, to show you how far this kind of thinking can get out of hand, I admit that I'd been considering the contamination problem too. My thought was that one could build a tower, say 4" PVC, and push air through the bottom with a shop vac or something, and blow all the dust and abrasive out the top of the tube... But don't worry - I'm neither crazy nor obsessive, and will just continue throwing the steel dust in the trash. :D

Thermite now...

Naw. Better not!

Ray I'm afraid I burned a hole in the inflatable anvil. Maybe you can use the bumper of my truck for your demonstration? No wait, I don't have a truck anymore. Well, I do have a nice chinese iron anvil I can throw in the trunk. :D

Thanks for the kind words about my profiling effort last weekend. I've been carrying the personal knife around, thinking how to tweak that blade. I'll probably make some adjustments before I grind the bevels in Friday morning. I realized that I haven't given any thought to what the handles are going to be on any of these knives, so that'll give me some playing around to do too, figuring that out. Hopefully I'll get these heat treated this weekend and start finishing them next. None of which creates as big a mess as all that abrasive and steel dust floating around in the air.

Yeah, I swept the place up when I quit last weekend, but there really is a lot of crap in the air. One of these days I'm going to switch my shop around so I can put the grinding bench on the driveway side of the room, and blow the air out the window. But if I started blowing shop air onto my wife's garden alongside the house... Well, let's just say my career would be over. Wish I'd thought of that before I put all that crap in there. It really does need some ventilation. On top of that, I have a beard so my respirator probably does absolutely no good whatsoever. I really need to spring for a positive pressure respirator, and I've started saving money from each sale to get one. Maybe I can make that happen this year. I've never worried about it too much since I didn't spend all that much time in the shop, but this has been a different story and I'm getting more exposure to dust than I like.
 
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