re:making your own tools

Car leaf springs are high carbon steel as well as coil springs.

Reply to
dturner9930
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Fussier people seek out offcuts or new stock from a spring shop. Used one do sometimes have stress cracks from use, which can spoil your work

- but the price of the material is right if you are willing to take that risk. I generally am among the not-fussy risk-takers who are cheap.

Reply to
Ecnerwal

I think you will find that the leaf and coil springs these days are something like 5160, which is a lot fancier than a simple high carbon steel. It is a 0.60% Carbon steel with about 1% Manganese and about 1 % Chromium steel. You would want to oil qunech, not water quench when hardening. Still a good choice for many cutting tools. If you find really old car springs (30's or 40's and older) thay may be plain carbon steel). I have been told that GM has used 5160 pretty much exclusively for many many years.

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Reply to
spaco

What about brake drums and rotors?

Wayne

Reply to
NoOne N Particular

Or rebar??

Reply to
NoOne N Particular

Unknown random steel - useless for toolmaking, as it's far too variable. Car springs either are, or might as well be, 5160. If you heat treat a car spring as if it's 5160, the odds are excellent that things will work.

Rebar will meet its tensile strength test, and you know nothing else about it. You know a tiny bit more about rebar that's rated as weldable, but still not much.

Usually cast - useless for cutters. Large ones make a nice base for a grinder.

If you go to one of the machine tool suppliers (MSC, McMaster-Carr, etc.), you can find extremely nice stuff as drill rod (round) and tool steel flats (rectangular), in your choice of various formulations (W1 and O1 being typically the most useful for home-shop processing). In the smaller sizes the prices are quite reasonable, considering that it's supplied at a known size, as a known alloy, in a known condition.

Reply to
Ecnerwal

Reply to
William Noble

As far as I've ever heard, rebar is random metal- you might get something good, or it might be useless.

Worth a shot, if you've got plenty of time and don't mind taking a little risk. Same story with railroad spikes.

Though in reality, if you can find a local supplier that carries it, new high-carbon steel is not very expensive. I think I paid $.60 a pound the last time I got it, and it's a lot easier to just use new metal that is about the right size than it is to entirely reshape scrounged stuff.

Reply to
Prometheus

Also useful for firepots on homemade coal forges, from what I gather.

Reply to
Prometheus

Agreed- even with the forge, I still do more grinding than anything. But it does make a lot of sense to have a smithing setup to do things you can't do any other way, and it makes heat treating a lot easier.

If you find a local machine or fabrication shop, and can explain why you want it, there is also a lot of old HSS tooling to be had for the asking. With some careful grinding, it makes excellent cutting tools. The big thing is explaining what you're doing- nobody will give you metal without that, as they'll assume that you just want to take it to the salvage yard.

Agreed, to an extent- but sometimes scrounging is just a matter of asking the right person. There's a fella at work who just asked me last night if I would be willing to trade him a new hunting knife for all the leaf springs I can handle, and a few sets of antlers. That sounded good enough to me, but before I could even say that, he went on to volunteer to grind all the springs smooth so that I could see if they were cracked. Even better.

The thing to keep in mind is that some guys actually do scrapping as a hobby, and they not only make some decent money at it, but have all the material in the world to offer in trade for whatever it is you're able to make from a portion of it. If you can find one of those guys, the four hours you might have spent to save five bucks might become two or three hours pursuing your hobby now and then for a lifetime's supply of material.

Reply to
Prometheus

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