Hot steel vs cold steel, the hard way I learned the difference

I had been trying to forge these bottle openers for months, taking cold scrap and just heating it up enough to bend. They kept cracking or snapping at the bend, no matter how careful I was. Then an old timer at the Tuesday night hammer-in told me I wasn't getting the steel hot enough, that I needed to work it yellow, not red. So on my next try I fired up the forge proper, let that quarter inch stock sit in the coals until it was throwing sparks and glowing almost white. The difference was night and day, the metal flowed like butter, no cracks, no fighting it. I felt stupid for skimping on the heat all that time, but in my defense my forge is a tiny homemade thing and I was scared of burning the steel up. Has anyone else been surprised by how much hotter you actually have to get the metal?

2 comments

2 Comments

cora4001mo ago

Oh come on, theres a limit to how hot you need to go. Ive been making bottle openers for years and I work my steel at a dull cherry red, never had a crack. All that extra heat just builds up scale and wastes fuel, plus you risk burning the carbon right out of the metal if you get it that hot. Maybe the real issue was your technique or the steel quality itself, not the temperature.

beth_baker691mo ago

Quote "dull cherry red" - yeah @cora400 I hear what you're saying but I think there's a bigger pattern here that applies to a lot of stuff in life. People always think they need less heat or less effort than they actually do. I've seen it with cooking, with learning new skills, with fixing stuff around the house. Everyone wants to save time or fuel or whatever but they end up making things harder on themselves in the long run. The old timer telling OP to go hotter is the same as a chef telling someone to actually preheat the pan properly. It's like we're all scared of going too far but most of the time the real problem is not going far enough. Your technique might work for you but that doesnt mean OP's steel was bad or technique was wrong, sounds like his setup just needed more heat to get the same result.