[rescue] Accidentally destroying hardware..

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 08:31:10AM -0500, George Adkins wrote:
> On Wednesday 27 March 2002 08:15 am, you wrote:
> > I think you have that backwards.  Steel is iron plus carbon, not minus
> > carbon :-)
> >
> 
> no, actually Iron + lots of carbon = brittle, like Cast Iron (which has lots 
> of carbon)  the trick is to get a low-carbon iron, and to get 'just enough' 
> carbon in it to make it behave the way you want...

You are leaving out consideration of the various crystalline forms the
metal can take, regardless of carbon content, such as martensite,
austenite, etc.  at different temperatures and depending on how
rapidly the metal is cooled from forging temperature.

You could perform exactly the same operation upon 2 pieces of the
exact same metal, but depending on how each was cooled you could end
up with metal that had quite different characteristics.

ObSun: a damascus steel case would probably look pretty cool.  Would
you need to put it on a SunBlade?

./patrick