[TheForge] Forged stainless-outdoors

[Ries Niemi]

I have never used 304L- but I have been doing a lot of forging lately 
with ordinary 304. When I say a lot, I am talking tons. As in thousands 
of pounds.
I have been having all the work electropolished commercially after 
forging.
This has been working very well. It brings everything back to shiny 
silver, depending on time in tank. If you desire a more matte finish, 
you can sandblast before electropolishing, and get a nice dull silver 
color.
In extremely heavy forgings, I have had a few pinhole size rust spots 
come up after 6 months or so- But these are easy to mechanicaly remove, 
with a grinder or sander- they are usually tiny cold shuts, or 
inclusions of mild steel slag that are embedded with the power hammer.

Tool discipline is essential- Clean, new wire brushes, sanding and 
grinding discs, that are NEVER used on anything but stainless. You can 
get small mild steel contaminations from steel workbenches, forklift 
forks, crowbars- any scraping with a mild steel tool can result in a 
small rust spot. So after electropolishing, we usually sling with nylon 
slings, rather than chains or directly with forks, and are careful with 
tools.

I would highly recommend either electropolishing or passivating, 
regardless of which alloy you use. I use an  electropolisher in Everett 
Wa. who has a large tank- 4'x4'x8'. There is another place in LA that 
has big tanks, and I am sure there are some in the midwest and east 
coast as well.
For a 4' x4' firescreen, my guy would probably charge me about 150 
bucks to electropolish.
If you are interested in photos of electropolished work, you can look 
on my website, www.riesniemi.com. Many of the public projects are 
electropolished stainless, (the DelMar Station has a lot of forged 
stainless that has been polished- about 6 tons total) as is the 
stainless steel burp gun in my personal artwork section.

ries