[TheForge] Re: blackened steel finish

[Mike Spencer]

"Lucky7Steel" <lucky7steel at gmail.com> wrote:

Karen> Anyone have any suggestions for getting basically the mat
Karen> finish of hot rolled on cold rolled steel?  I have trouble
Karen> finding Patina's in Toronto.

All the replies have addressed the 2nd sentence: how to get a black
patina.  My experience with cold rolled is not that I can't get a
nice black finish, it's that the relatively shiny surface texture
doesn't go away.  It's not clear whether Karen is looking for a patina
or for a way to modify the industrial-product look of the smooth
finish on cold rolled.

For the latter, you might take a yellow heat so that the piece scales
a little.  Or you might try sand blasting. Forging all over at a
yellow heat should do it but you knew that, so that probably isn't
suitable for your purpose.

There was a point when I could only get 3/8" square in cold rolled and
I just gave up making fire pokers out of 3/8 sq because the cold
rolled look, even with the corners chamfered, didn't suit me and the
price of a poker in my market didn't justify more messing around.

Pokers? Yarn time:  

A long-time friend came by one day and wanted fire poker.  So I rooted
in my pile of rusty junk, found one left over from my crafty markety
days, cleaned it up and blacked it in the fire.  No charge.  The
friend has a lot of credit, y'know?  He got a big kick out of the
art-found-in-a-junk-pile part.

A couple of months later, he showed up with his girlfriend and wanted
another fire poker, this time as a gift for Bill.  But the previous
year, I'd done a little job for Bill and told him the fee was a case
of beer, delivered before the end of August.  The beer never
materialized.  So this time, I found yet another poker of the same
vintage in the same junk heap, did protocol with wire brush and hot
blacking and told my friend it was forty bucks. After a conference
with the girlfriend, he took it very well, paid up.  I told him the
story about the case of beer a couple of years later.



- Mike

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