7 ms·
Iron, How Did They Make It, Part IVa: Steel Yourself
- tape_measure 6y agoSomething interesting to note is that hardening steel does not significantly change the stiffness of the material. A spring or sword that is heat treated to a soft condition (annealed) is not more floppy than the object in the normal hardened condition.
- yesenadam 6y agoI googled the question, and found a fascinating discussion by academics from around the world here https://www.researchgate.net/post/Will_the_Youngs_Modulus_E_value_change_with_heat_treatment https://www.researchgate.net/post/Will_the_Youngs_Modulus_E_...
- Cerium 6y agoNot only does the Young's modulus hardly change between soft and hard steel, it barely changes for any steel. This provides an interesting constraint for some types of engineering. For example, if you are making a bridge you can use better steel to make it stronger, but you can't use better steel to make the bridge have less deflection for a given load. You can only change deflection by engineering the shape and design of the bridge.
- plat12 6y agoPrevious Parts: Part 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517792 Part 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24591216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24591216 Part 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24668125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24668125
- thaumasiotes 6y agoTypos / proofreading errors abound in this piece compared to his other work. It makes me wonder if everything is ok. :/
- Xylakant 6y agoThe same kind of complaint was raised against the previous post and someone posted a link to the authors tweet about that. Seems like they prefer to publish the content first and then do proofreading passes.
- hinkley 6y agoSomething I’ve learned from my own writing is that it’s possible to copy edit a piece of text into illegibility. When I look at my stuff from the heyday of blogs, half of it is, “wow, did I really write that?” And the other half I have no idea what I was trying to say. Sometimes it’s better to just stop and publish.
- Xylakant 6y agoFrom the readers side I prefer that approach, too - I’d rather have the content available with some typos than stuck in the editing pipeline of the author. If it’d be a book or some professional publication, I’d probably have higher expectations, but for someone who has no dedicated person hunting copy mistakes - let’s cut them some slack.
- refurb 6y agoThe other thing I learned is you can get quite good at writing if you do enough of it. I've never been that much of a writer, but I ended up as the internal communications person at my company. Not exciting at all. I was actually dreading it. After doing it for a year, I got pretty good at it (I'd like to think). I'm able to pretty quickly throw together an email or press release that's clear (avoids BS corporate speak), concise (summarize a paragraph in one sentence) and sets the right tone (why should the reader care). Now I read others people's work (not talking about this blog post at all, I haven't read it) and subconsciously edit it my head. My takeaway? Anyone can be a good writer with enough practice.
- DarthGhandi 6y agoHe's getting a lot of ripoffs copying his work verbatim, nearly all of it occurs within a few hours of being posted here. None of it has attribution, all are selling ads. Some are copying comments from the threads here and putting them down the bottom of their fake blogs also to give it some legitimacy. It's a shame when people who write high quality stuff like this for free end up treated this way by digital parasites. It's not an easy problem to solve, either you lock it up and get no exposure or you get robbed. His work will still be there years from now, the poorly proofread copies likely will be too. I made that original comment in the last thread, it was only speculation but it's an easy, low cost strategy to deal with this. Let it get popular on HN with no proofreading, it gets copied, then fix it in a week or two and keep the version more likely to stand the test of time.
- japanuspus 6y ago"Harald the Blacksmith" has a related series of articles [0] on ab-initio iron production, but with more focus on the DIY-aspects. I have used those articles a lot as reference for doing iron smelting with my scouts. Another excellent resource on the magic of iron is the hypertext "Iron, Steel and Swords" by Helmut Föll [1] -- which is also an interesting experience just for the form of presentation. [0]: https://www.haraldthesmith.com/iron-smelting/ https://www.haraldthesmith.com/iron-smelting/ [1]: https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/index.html https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/index.html
- 2sk21 6y agoBoth links are excellent !
- vba 6y agoAlso relevant I watched Jason Crawford’s (check out his roots of progress blog) talk on the history of iron and steel a while back https://youtu.be/--64nPQOtkI https://youtu.be/--64nPQOtkI
- Animats 6y agoWill this series go on to cover the Bessemer converter? That changed the world. For millennia, steel was a high-cost, low-volume item, like titanium today. Then, in the 1850s, Bessemer and others finally figured out how to scale up steel making. Suddenly production went from blacksmith-scale to tens of tons per hour.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoThere is some discussion of the Bessemer process here: https://rootsofprogress.org/iron-from-mythical-to-mundane https://rootsofprogress.org/iron-from-mythical-to-mundane The old posts on the blog can be pretty interesting, though the author seems to have viewed it more as a stepping stone to becoming a political activist than as a project in its own right.
- joosters 6y agoThe earlier parts of the series detail the huge amount of effort and resources required to obtain workable iron; the Bessemer process alone doesn't immediately scale up your steel production, you need a vast amount of industrialisation elsewhere to support it.
- lucozade 6y agoThe series is about ancient and medieval processes so I think it's unlikely.
- chronolitus 6y agoQuote from the first part: "I will do my best to capture changes in metal-working techniques in the medieval period. What I am not going to cover in detail is modern steel and iron-working (that is, post-industrial-revolution), though I will occasionally note how it is different"
- CydeWeys 6y agoBret is a Roman/medieval historian, so most likely not.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fdm-hn-hiring 6y agoA little bit tangential, but if the reader is interested in steelmaking, ironmaking, and blacksmithing, then I would like to draw their attention to my business - which is hiring [1]! There is incredible complexity involved in performing these processes on an industrial scale in the modern day. This means that many important control decisions are made using approximate heuristics. And this leads to huge inefficiencies. For example, a typical steel plant spends many $10s million/year on energy, but the theoretical minimum needed is far less. We are working on solving this problem by achieving totally optimal control. We create data-driven predictive process models that can simulate the physics and chemistry of the very quickly. This allows us to simulate different control tactics in real time - continuously evaluating different options in response to live observations. [1] https://www.foresightdatamachines.com/jobs https://www.foresightdatamachines.com/jobs or email me: info [at] foresightdatamachines [dot] com
- csours 6y agoThis seems like the kind of problem where the upside is small per each batch, but the potential downside is large per batch.
- bluGill 6y agoBut the down sides should be worked out in their prototype stage, once they sell this to manufactures the process should be worked leaving only upside. If they can make even a small improvement it will be adopted just because the first that does will see the improvement in their bottom line.
- nickik 6y agoWhat is your opinion on what Boston Metal is doing? Seem like a totally new way of refining iron and producing steel that should also be more efficient.
- jacobedawson 6y agoI can recommend the book 'Men, Machines and Modern Times' by Elting E. Morison for (among other things) a fascinating look into the early development of the steel industry & manufacturing process / development of the Bessemer steel process, I never thought I'd find steel so engrossing :)
- zajio1am 6y agoFor people interested in history of metallurgy from more technical side i would suggest this website: https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/ https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/ - Helmut Föll: Iron, Steel and Swords - A detailed history of iron and steel from a Materials Science point of view.
- strongbond 6y agoI grew up in a steel town (Port Talbot, South Wales) in the shadow of a massive steel plant. It's very interesting to be able to decompose Bret's descriptions and align each stage of the process with its modern, automated equivalent (... give or take).
- Symmetry 6y agoAre we going to put every ACOUP post up on Hacker News going forward? Because I would be on board with that. He's got a lot of good content on his site besides the iron/steel sequence, I thought his contrast between Sauron's well executed attack on Minas Tirath versus Saruman's amateurish attack on Helm's Deep was quite well done as well.