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Old 09-05-12, 08:33 PM
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MassiveD
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You should never heat this steel to yellow hot to form it. It forms easily when cold. You might encounter a situation where the tooling to cold form it is too much trouble, but you do not need to heat it above a dull red (dim ambient light) to form it. Yellow heat is a good deal for iron, or steel when smithing heavy heats. The main problem with tubing is that being thin walled it can simply burn up enough that one looses integrity. With large smithing projects the scale formed comes off in a shower of spars, but since there is plenty of bulk to redistribute, it can't harm anything that it is loosing a little.

It is not normal to get enough hardness in a steel with 30 points of carbon for it to resist a serious drill bit. The bit is hardened to a much higher level than one can ever achieve with 30 points, and carbide will drill even hardened tool steel. But you got what you got in there, and the evidence was before you as others have said. One thing about drilling metal is that it requires slow speed and steady heavy pressure. When using a drill driver set it at the screw driving speed, not the drilling speed. A brace and bit with a drill bit, actually does an amazing job of drilling simple jobs since one can develop a lot of piercing pressure in that configuration. Of course a drill press with a vise is great, and in many places one can be picked up for 30 bucks.
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