[TheForge] untapped resource?

[Larry Brown]

I've been making stuff for years with them. They can be very tough steel, I 
don't know if they are all the same stuff though so find a size blade that 
you like the steel in and try to grab a lot of those. I have had some that 
don't harden well and some that can hold an edge. Just remember in their 
past life they rotated at a high speed and hit things so look for cracks 
near the eye and the ends to keep from wasting your forging time.
Larry Brown


At 10:21 PM 9/27/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>Hey all,
>       The other day, while I was driving home from work, it suddenly occured
>to me that lawn mower blades are good steel...obvious I know....but I
>stopped at a lawn mower store and asked if I could have the old blades that
>they took off when they replaced them...They showed me a bin that had about
>500 blades and said, "Take as many as you want!!"....long blades.....blades
>made of something high carbon and only slightly thick for knives...(3/16)
>
>I did a grinding spark test and also heated and quenched and then shattered
>one so I know its at least 1080. I flattened and annealed one and just
>finished grinding out a Usuba ocho (japanese vegatable cleaver).  It seems
>like the metal is great!  The two stores I called said that I could have as
>many as I wanted as often as I wanted........
>
>
>Sooooo.....Why have I never heard people talk about this resource before?
>Have I just not noticed?  Is the metal toxic and contains something that
>will kill anyone uses it? :)
>
>Dan
>www.irontreeworks.com
>
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