Unknown steel type, roller bearings

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I came into about 60 roller bearings and their race. The race is somewhere around 12 inches or so and the bearings are all 1.5x3. I was curious if there was still anyone on the forum that would test steels for their properties. In reading old threads there would be people who would offer their services for some of the steel if it was decent. I would be willing to send 5-10 for testing them.

It is not case hardened, I checked that. And they came off of a piece of Cat equipment from my dads work, a large quarry. I found some pics on here of 52100 spark testing and it looked similar. I want to hope its 52100 but I don't want to guess on it really.

Also, when forging these, I hear about not over heating them. What is too hot? Bright yellow/white?

Thank you.
 
What's the manufacturer? If Timken there likely 52100 and you should be able to contact them and find out. Unless I can get a lot of the same material I don't generally mess with found steel too much anymore. It's still fun to play with, but not worth the effort for small pieces. I did pack all the rollers from a mud pump home from Australia. We changed out a bearing and the rollers were about 1 3/4" thick by 4" long, all from the same Timken bearing. I took a few home in luggage and forged a test blade, it turned out to be 52100 and was worth the effort to lug the rest of them home over several trips as I had a known quality of steel in large enough pieces to develop a heat treat for that batch.

On 52100, it's a good idea not to forge over about 1625 deg. F. I like to start out about 1600 and by the time I'm forging the blade I'm down to about 1550. Any hotter and you can get grain growth. You could forge hotter and then normalize and cycle to reduce the grain growth, but then you've lost any possibility of gains from forging as your basically back to where you started.
 
Good roller bearings are made of 52100 or very similar alloy.
It is slow moving when forging, so use high temps, don't forge cold or you get microfractures and ugly carbide clustering....you'll take care of the grain structure after finished forging, with a good normalization (1670 °F) and following with thermal cycles at lower temperatures (1550 - 1500 - 1450). At the last step of cycling you could even throw in a quench if you want a very fine microstructure.
 
I agree with Stezann. Work it hot and normalize when done forging. Do a series of grain refinement cycles when done grinding the blade and ready for HT.
 
Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith said:
I agree with Stezann. Work it hot and normalize when done forging. Do a series of grain refinement cycles when done grinding the blade and ready for HT.
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Stacy,
Yesterday morning myself and a friend forged one of these down. I've seen you comment on forging bearings by hand is a waste of time. I understand that now
These are 1.5 x 2.75-3. It took us several hours just to get it into some form of a billet. We were swinging a 10lb sledge I made into a rounder and a 5lb straight peen. I see why people are fans of presses and power hammers. But, after heat treating last night, I do believe it is 52100. It got extremely hard out of the quench. I did 3 normalizing cycles like you've mentioned in previous posts.
Was the juice worth the squeeze? No. But was it a fun day? Yes.
 
If it's not case hardened it should be 52100 or one of that family. The check for case hardening should be the first thing you do.There is a minimum hardness you look for in the center of the roller. Other than that the larger the roller the higher the hardenabilityt you should have .How do I know ?Years ago I was a Timken metallurgist !
 
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