At this point I have about 15 lb of steel combined with slag and other debris. The next step is to consolidate the different chunks of steel into a solid bar. I don't plan to use all of the steel. I am going to save one of the halves of the bloom as a memento. I will also set aside some pieces for chemical analysis.

On to the pictures.

I have sorted the steel using the spark test. I have high carbon, medium carbon and lower carbon sections separated and ready for the forge.

I put a few chunks in the forge and waited to reach temp to start consolidating. A few remarks about working with this material: WOW! It forge-welds at lower temps than steel from the mill. It moves like butter and is self-fluxing. It sticks to itself so easily that I feel like I would rather not use regular steel any more.

Here I am using my flywheel press to flatten some of the chunks. I tried different strategies for the consolidation. For the smaller chunks I flatten first then stack them on top of each other and weld them together.

The control that the flywheel press gives for this task made it my first choice to work the material.

For the smallest pieces I simply stack them on top of a larger chunk that I had already flatten. The properties of this steel allowed me to weld those onto the larger chunk with such ease that I decided to keep using this method to grow the billet. At this point I have not done any folding, I am simply growing the billet by adding little chunks and consolidating into a larger piece.

Like so.

When the billet was big enough I started to add more and more of the little pieces on top and work the processes of welding and consolidating at the same time. When I look at the clock on my wall I realized that the amount of time I spent in doing this was less than the amount of time I normally spend in forge-welding regular steel. Since it sticks together so well and requires a lower temp to weld it also needed less time to soak in the forge to reach the right temperature.

Here you can see a little chunk that I added on top of the bar getting quickly hot enough to weld it to the bar.

The bar was growing in size quite rapidly.

To work the biggest chunks from the smelt I use a variation of the previous strategy. Another interesting thing that I noticed is that these larger pieces require a lot less work and seem to want to stick together and consolidate even better than the little chunks.

Here the large piece has reached enough temperature to start working with it.

I was able to square the whole thing in one pass but now I am using the hydraulic press for the larger pieces.

Then once I had a nice bar formed I started to add more little chunks to it as I did before to grow it larger. I was keeping the bars separated into 3 categories according to the carbon content based on the spark test.

Adding some more pieces.

A little of a side view gives a better idea as to what I am doing. The big bar is at the bottom and on top there are multiple irregular size chunks that will be welded on to the bar at the same time that the consolidation of the bar takes place. I could have used the Japanese wafer (tekogane) system but it would had taken longer and accomplish the same result in the end.

A better view of the little chunks on top of the growing bar that is already consolidated.

After all that hot work here is the result.

I have my lower carbon bars, my higher carbon and the bars that came from the larger portions of the bloom itself.

I have consolidated about about half of my material and I have a total of 5# in steel bars now. The leftovers below will be process some other day.

FINAL SCORES:

I started with 15# of material. I have 5# left to process and I have set aside another 2 and 1/2 pounds as souvenirs. So far I have 5 pounds in clean solid steel bars. So that means that I lost close to 30% in the consolidation process. I am guessing another 30-50% by weight of what is left will be gone by the time I finish stacking the bars together and folding the steel a few times. But that will be the next chapter in the story.

For the next chapter click here.