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Message: <blockquote data-quote="buzzard" data-source="post: 1501322" data-attributes="member: 3003">Always good to have your carrion eating metallurgist invoked. OK, in the present day Steel is the most recycled material out there. So your friend has a pretty solid idea. However, as has been stated steel melts at a pretty high temperature (around 1500 C). The ability to get to that temperature is pretty tricky, and furnance materials of the era probably really don't cut it. (as well as the lack of forced bellows mentioned earlier)As for the elements being separated, if it is plain carbon steel (far and away the most likely occurance since alloying intentionally is a pretty modern occurrence), the carbon is in a percentage well below saturation in a steel, so it would actually is a major chore to get the carbon out. One of the major refining steps in making steel is to blow oxygen through it to burn off excess carbon. So no, if your chum can figure out how to melt it, it will probably stay at about the same composition. Granted the carbon does react on contact with the air, but so does the iron, which will form a layer of protective slag which floats on top and slows reaction. Now your real problem is the question of what is he recovering? It is raw material steel? Honestly that's probably not going to be the greatest stuff. If he does manage to melt it he has to find a way of keeping the slag from getting mixed in (which still happens today with much better artificial slag)), and that really mucks up your steel. The contained ceramic slag is equivalent to having cracks throughout the steel. If you melt in the presence of a lot of carbon, you can keep the slag forming reaction under control, but you end up picking up a lot of carbon which will make the steel brittle. Pity the ancient metallurgist, for he had to handle a lot of complicated stuff with both basic tools, and no analytical tools but experience. In the face of what they were up against, they did some amazing jobs. Now if he just wants to sell the steel to a blacksmith to be re-hammered into something else, he should do OK (swords into plowshares and all that). However, I really don't see steel as ever being that valuable as a raw material. The work that goes into forming it into something useful is what is costly. So you want a number for materials discount? Maybe 10% at the high end. buzzard</blockquote>

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