[TheForge] Re: File Making, sniffing up wrought iron

[Jerry Frost]

I was thinking of sea salt being the source of the 
fumes but it's just a guess.

There's undoubtably a big difference between wrought 
from the WWI era and WWII. By time WWII came around 
wrought was being replaced by mild steel and what 
wrought was still being produced was machine made on a 
fairly large scale. When you're making "wrought" by 
adding silica to Bessemer converted "pure iron" and 
running it through rolling mills at a high rate of 
speed you're going to end up with a different product. 
>From what I've read about this kind of wrought it was 
much more uniform and refined from the start. 
Advertisements for it made a big deal out of it's 
higher degree of refinement at lower cost.

I know there was wrought being made this way before WWI 
too but by WWII it was about the only way it was being 
made. I don't think much if any wrought was made after 
WWII.

No wrought around here to speak of, some in the bush 
but that's pretty inaccessible. To me anyway. <sigh>

Frosty
-------------------------------
If it ain't forged
it ain't real.
Wrought iron is.
The FrostWorks

Meadow Lakes, AK.


From: "Andrew Vida" <osan at netlabs.net>


> And where on the coast would this be? :)
>
> I dug a good 1/4 ton of wrought out of the Columbia 
> and Willamette rivers.  There are old docks in 
> Vancouver where they used to build the Liberty ships 
> during the war.  I found a lot of dogs for sistering 
> up cribbing buried in the sand, as well as chain, 
> tooling (with welded bits), tie bolts and other 
> items.  I pounded some of it with Ralph Douglas 
> (anyone hear from him?) at his house and got no such 
> hints of noxious death from the material, so I 
> suppose the salts may indeed have something to do 
> with it.
>
> Of course, we cannot rule out that most of my wrought 
> was found in NJ, pollution capital of the USA.  Who 
> knows what else might be on that iron. OTOH, the 
> material I pulled out of the water in Philly gives 
> off the same fume as well.
>
> Just before I left to WA I had the opportunity to get 
> a great piece of wrought they dug out of the 
> graveyard in Perth.  Looked like triple-refined, 
> judging by the etch - appeared to be part of a 
> derrick of some sort - 4 1/2" solid round and perhaps 
> 15 ft long, all bent up and somewhere about 800#. 
> Got the call to go to WA on a Friday and was at work 
> the following Monday, so that one got away.  Shame, 
> too... looked like prime iron.
>