[TheForge] Re: Flux, was rust & pickling

[Mike Spencer]

> So are you telling me that melting borax on an iron cookie will pick
> up some of the iron?

Following up to my own post...

How do you melt borax on a cookie tin?  The melting point is around
1500F, a red heat.

Checking in the handbook, borax loses 8 of its 10 bound water
molecules at 140F and the rest at about 400F.  But it doesn't melt
until waayyy hotter than that.

I never tried to dehydrate borax in the oven at, say, 450F.  I melted
some up last night over the forge in a cast iron ladle (kinda messy),
poured it into a cast iron bowl where it turned to black glass.  Broke
it up into pea size, then ran it through an old manual meat grinder
with the hamburger die modified to be more like a grain grinder.  Nice
powdery stuff that should be good for flux.

Someone said that anhydrous borax will quickly re-absorb water from
the air.  I think a maybe the advantage to bothering with melting and
grinding the borax is that in the glassy state it doesn't do that very
readily.

Just 'spearminting around...

- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                 						   /V\ 
mspencer@tallships.ca            						  /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/						  ^^-^^

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