Now I wonder if that is how these "magic cut" wasabi and ginger sachets work.
Guess I've got some googling to do.
PE = polyethylene. The most popular plastic on this planet.
HDPE = high-density polyethylene. One of the most common plastics. Milk jugs, glue bottles, etc.
Stick some UHMW tape on anything that needs to slide easier. Its surface is quite slippery
all the polyethylenes are relatively inert, because polyethylenes are in some sense just heavy paraffins. paraffin is germanized latin for 'relatively inert'
Some Nalgene's are polycarbonate, like those commonly drunk from. But not all, some are HDPE[0,1,2].
Some are Polypropylene co-polymer[3] but those are more for specialist things I guess.
[0] https://ultralightoutdoorgear.co.uk/ultralite-1-litre-wide-m... [1] https://www.cotswoldoutdoor.com/p/nalgene-hdpe-125ml-wide-mo... [2] https://www.elitemountainsupplies.co.uk/camping-trekking-c4/... [3] https://www.thelabwarehouse.com/products/bottle-nalgene-ppco...
ACOUP noted that blacksmiths might be assisted by unskilled laborers, strikers, who had the actual job of lifting the hammer and hitting the object with it.
Make gracious assumptions.
Digging ditches generally sucks, same as I imagine being a striker, but most anyone can do it (until their body gives out, anyway, which in some cases is 'immediately').
The only question is whether someone will pay you for doing the fancy skill/science tricks or not.
Both of those points are untrue. Strikers are unskilled labor and in general are not learning how to forge. The smith shows where he wants the hammer to fall, and they let it fall there.
https://acoup.blog/2020/10/02/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
> Things were worse for the many strikers and other laborers who were essentially unskilled hired hands or even enslaved laborers (given their depiction in artwork, it seems likely many ancient strikers were slaves) of much lower status and who could not expect to be trained into blacksmiths themselves some day. While some strikers were probably apprentices in training, it is quite clear that not all of them were! These workers would also have been far less richly paid; indeed, the entire point of strikers was to have laborers who could be paid very little but still amplify the production ability of the blacksmith himself.
(emphasis original)
Sure, it takes a ton of muscle, but you can quickly screw up a piece by repeatedly beating the hell out of it.
just squishing steel does actually make it stronger, because it increases the number of dislocations in its crystal structure. smaller grains mean higher strength even without the variable grain direction. also, peening, which is not exactly the same as forging but is also just squishing steel, can give you higher strength for a third reason: areas with residual compressive stress can't initiate cracks until you overcome that stress, which increases strength. even more, though, it increases fatigue resistance
>"Can you forge metals in a highly controlled and directed magnetic field where you can orient the grain/alignment of atoms/fields in whatever direction you want. Further, if true, what happens when you make damascus from varying plated that have particular alignments/grains - and what are the features of this material?
This is how you make magnets. "Soft" ferromagnets have small, round grains that rotate to reinforce outside fields. "Hard" ferromagnets have permanent fields of their own and long grains that can't reorient.
Forging with a field has a very low impact on the material properties because of how weak a magnetic field is compared to the forces moving atoms- same reason steel loses its magnetic properties when it gets hot.
> what happens when you make damascus from varying plated that have particular alignments/grains
"Damascene" is the layered look most often made from acid etching sandwiched and forge-welded layers of different steels. Damascus is a single alloy for which the pattern is named.
Since in both cases the material is melted together, it's far too hot for any magnetic properties to have any impact.
Though I was thinking of super intense magnetic fields (like in CERN), however, Ill leave it to my Comic Book Science collection, then :-)
Then I started working in engineering, and I can't find any support for these claims. For sure when a steel bar is worked down to become wire for a steel rope, it cannot be pulled to an elongation of 100x increasing strength. A36 steel which is a basic structural steel has an elongation at break of 23% in a 2" gauge length [1]. In every rolling mill I've been in, there is a limited amount of reduction per pass through the mill, after which the metal needs to go for thermal treatment to be annealed to remove all the cold work. Every time you anneal the material, you completely resets the elongation (internal plastic strain) and strengthening due to work hardening. If they do too much reduction in one pass or at too low of a temperature, it cracks the material and makes it weaker.
For sheet metal, there is lore about the material being stronger in the rolling direction as that is the direction of grain flow. I have yet to find a source that can point to any large difference. In papers like this [2] there are claims of certain orientations of samples relative to rolling direction have different tensile properties, but when you look at the tensile charts, there is minimal difference. The yield strength in these charts isn't reported, but all three orientations look to yield at the same point. In this test the across the grain (90 degree to rolling direction) orientation had the highest tensile strength which is the opposite of the expectation of the forging "grain flow" promoters. But the magnitude of the difference isn't large, and is small relative to normal factors of safety in a reasonable design.
When designing automotive components, I've only ever seen forging methods selected for efficiency of production. If a part mostly fills the envelope of a bar or plate, it is cut from bar or plate in all cases. If there is a lot of void volume in the part, the calculation will be made to determine if the cost of developing forging tooling and development will get paid back in reduced material and machining cost. I have yet to see the dimensions of the part change with manufacturing method, which would be needed if the non-forged part was significantly weaker.
And finally, a lot of forged parts are subsequently heat treated. When heat treating steel all of the grains in the steel have to be destroyed and recrystallized. That is the mechanism by which heat treatment works. Depending on the exact process and part geometry, this process removes or reduces the grain flow in the finished parts.
Having said that, the claim of superiority of forging persists, and I'd love to see a technical reference that shows the magnitude of the change from someone who has plausibly actually tested the effect.
[1] https://matweb.com/search/DataSheet.aspx?MatGUID=d1844977c5c... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283447700_The_effec...
disclaimer: i don't have a relevant technical reference handy, and i'm far from an expert on the area, which is vast, and i recognize you know things i don't about it. still, i do spend a lot of time reading papers with metallurgical micrographs in them†, and i think i figured out the answer to your question many years ago, so i will explain my understanding
except for the part about grain orientation, anyway
> In every rolling mill I've been in, there is a limited amount of reduction per pass through the mill, after which the metal needs to go for thermal treatment to be annealed to remove all the cold work. Every time you anneal the material, you completely resets the elongation (internal plastic strain) and strengthening due to work hardening. If they do too much reduction in one pass or at too low of a temperature, it cracks the material and makes it weaker.
as i understand it, this is exactly right, but you say it as if it's contradictory. strain hardening increases the yield strength of metal (by making it yield). it can also change the tensile strength, but to a much smaller degree. when the metal can no longer handle stress by yielding, in particular by yielding in a way that produces further work hardening, so that the yield is distributed over the metal rather than being concentrated wherever it starts, it cracks. that's why strain hardening metal makes it more prone to cracking. in general, a given metal is more prone to cracking when you harden it, whether you harden it by cold forging, case hardening, or quenching. (peening is the exception; it inhibits crack initiation by a different method.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_hardening has an overview that talks about how this phenomenon can be either desirable or undesirable
the change in yield strength from cold working can be quite large, a factor of 4 or so. it doesn't change the ultimate tensile strength much (or at all in the case of your wire rope), but there are a lot of cases where what you care about is the yield strength, not the uts, because if the part yields by more than a tiny amount, it is out of tolerance and has therefore failed
(with respect to a36 steel, elongation at break, and wire rope, this is a minor detail, but it's possible to elongate it somewhat more through rolling than you can through wire-drawing. but you are certainly correct that you cannot elongate it 100×, and wire rope is mostly made by drawing, not by rolling.)
there are different kinds of heat treatment, but the most common kind for steel involves a phase transition to austenite and back, which does indeed destroy the entire grain structure of the steel, losing any potential advantage of forging, precisely as you say. i'd think this would also be mostly true for hot-forging, where steel is forged while still austenitic; the relevant grain structure for strength will be the one that the steel acquires when it leaves the austenite phase. there are other kinds of heat treatment (more commonly used with things like aluminum) that don't involve fully recrystallizing the metal, and i would expect some grain structure to survive those
probably none of that is telling you anything you don't already know, but perhaps it's a different way of thinking about the things you know that explains the apparent contradictions
as for which direction i would expect grain orientation to make things strongest in, i really have no idea at all
______
† last night, for example, i read https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4701/8/2/91/pdf and https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jjspm/63/7/63_15-00089/..., but also parts of https://pure.tue.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/1584410/617544.pdf, http://www.diva-portal.se/smash/get/diva2:1352113/FULLTEXT01..., https://yadda.icm.edu.pl/baztech/element/bwmeta1.element.baz..., https://www.imerys.com/public/2022-03/Specialty-Carbons-for-..., and https://backend.orbit.dtu.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/200743982..., but i was maybe on a bit of an atypical metallurgy bender. none of these are more than marginally relevant to the questions at hand of forging, strain-hardening/work-hardening, and grain structure orientation
I'm not saying cold working doesn't happen, or doesn't affect strength. It certainly does. I'm pushing back on the idea that forging creates superior strength via grain flow. One of the sibling comments pointed out the MIL spec materials handbook[1] where he found some materials that do exhibit a strength dependency on grain direction. That is interesting.
That seems to be the exception rather than the rule. If you go to page 3-220 in that spec, they show 5052 Aluminum in varying degrees of cold work (H32, H34, H36, and H38), where higher degrees of cold work have higher ultimate and yield strengths, but the L vs LT directions are identical in many cases, or 1 different. That goes against the general idea that forging grain flow creates superior strength in general.
[1]http://everyspec.com/MIL-HDBK/MIL-HDBK-0001-0099/MIL_HDBK_5J...
If you cold forge there are some benefits (but the question would be what can actually be reliably be cold forged and be a useful object in our precise world ?). If you hot forge and/or heat treat, most of the benefits are lost pretty fast, so it doesn’t make much difference.
As the OP seems to intuit there is probably not much real strength benefits to forging for useful objects in real use cases scenarios, the reason they are forged have to do with manufacturing processes more than anything else.
At least this is what I understand…
The first relevant example I found was on page 3-86, extruded 2024, 2.250 - 2.499 inch cross-section. For ultimate tensile strength, F_tu, the L (in the direction of extrusion) allowable is 57 ksi, while the LT (perpendicular to the direction of extrusion) allowable is 39 ksi. That's a 30% drop in strength.
[1] http://everyspec.com/MIL-HDBK/MIL-HDBK-0001-0099/MIL_HDBK_5J...
So it looks like the effect is very alloy dependent. I didn't see any of the steels having any notable directionality. Also Aluminum 6061 doesn't show any directionality either. Outside aerospace, I suspect that covers the majority of metal tonnage used.
A very good example of the affect of annealing tungsten wire is here [1] – note that (a) there is a very clear orientation dependence that some difficult geometric transformations will undoubtedly show means that they are aligned in the wire drawing dimension; and (b) after annealing at 1600 ºC for an hour the preference is slightly reduced but still about 15 sigma away from random...
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/001-110-and-111-pole-fig...
This paper [1] has some good data in it:
"The experiments in this study were developed to verify the influence of the grain-flow orientation on fatigue life and its impact on the anisotropic properties of a mechanical component. To this end, steel specimens were made, and their fiber was oriented by machining and hot forging. Subsequently, they were subjected to flexo-rotational fatigue tests in a piece of specific equipment to determine their fatigue life."
(...) They then describe three parts: A, properly forged, B, improperly forged, and C, machined. (...)
"The results showed that specimens of configuration A achieved a much longer fatigue life than configurations B and C, actually doubling it. The results indicated a similar fatigue life behavior between configurations B and C. It is important to emphasize that this similar behavior between these two configurations is valid for this case analyzed (...)"
My opinion was formed from another area that is related : the pretense that “forged” knife are stronger, and hold their edges better, etc. I have seen some mostly nonsensical electronically microscope observations that didn’t prove anything except minor differences in “fiber” patterns that cannot be reliably be shown to be better in experimental protocols (provided you heat treat the metal in the same way and everything else being equal in particular the particular alloy).
I think this is one of those things that people keep repeating without any evidence because very is a large amount of marketing behind it as well as vested interests to sell more expensive supposedly superior “artisanal” stuff.
There are many examples of the likes, being mostly belief/lores repeated ad nauseam that becomes “true” just because everyone is saying it, yet with no hard evidence !
This is a super underappreciated fact! It's often repeated that forging is just stronger, but just squishing steel does NOT make it stronger. Forging a part is so much more than just smashing it into a shape.
Steel cable is made of pretty ordinary steel which is stretched 100s of times its original length. That process alone makes it 2-4x stronger in that direction. You stretch steel and it gets stronger in that direction.
Do you see how complicated that optimization process becomes? The process steps are not just trying to take it to the final shape. Your piston rod needs to be strong lengthwise, so you actually want to start with a short fat ingot and stretch it out instead of one that is near-final size.
Think of making an I-beam. You could hammer out the middle, making it thinner. That would give you a bit of strength there but very little on the edges. If you instead pull the edges out, you create a long continuous stretch that will be very strong against bending. Where, how, and in what order you stretch makes all the difference. You may want to leave extra material and cut it off later, so that your grains are all oriented together instead of tapering to a point.
For any moderately complex part, this process is as complicated as modern engineering problems. With poor steel you genuinely need to understand how to foster and bring out those continuous lines or your corkscrew will unwind like playdough. Blacksmiths had a legitimately intellectual job back in the day!