No. "By mechanical means" is not the proper terminology. Mechanical means implies a mechanism or a tool to remove the material. You can't find a 'tool' to mechanically remove salt from water. But 'physical means' implies much more. You can remove salt from water by changing the physical state of the water - boil it off. In high enough concentration you can revert the salt back to solid and remove it by filtration. You could convert the water to solid and remove the salt by precipitation.

I said before that I am not in the pratice of working with molten metals but, with enough heat, one could distill the components from the steel (each of the components does have a vapor pressure and could be distilled with lots of heat). I never said that you'd want to do it nor that it would be economical, only that it is possible by purely 'physical' means. That's what makes the steel a mixture of components and not a compound unto itself.

It cumbles at the edges but the whole argument is still sound. We don't refer to aluminum alloys by other names, nor to the other metals I listed other than copper. I had forgotten about them. I did make a mistake there.

And there in lies the whole problem - normal convention. We use normal convention all the time in our lives. That doesn't mean that normal convention is correct. Normal convention says that salt is ionic compound from the reaction of sodium and chlorine but that is only one salt. A salt is any ionic compound that results from the reaction of an acid and a base. Calcium carbonate (limestone) is a salt. Quartz is a salt. Aspirin is a salt. There are literally thousands of salts.

The other issue is that you stated that steel has no iron in it. You can argue until the cows come home that it doesn't but your statement is still wrong! Even if the added materials to the iron solution were to be chemically bound to the iron in the steel, the steel would still have the element iron in it. There is no getting around that. Any metallurgist should be able to tell that. Unless you are the one performing alchemy, the iron can't be changed to something else. Even if you were to oxidize completely to rust (iron oxide) it would still have iron in it.

Quite changing my words! I did not say cookware. I said appliances. Stoves, refrigerators, dishwasher, etc. These appliances don't have exteriors of sheet stainless applied over carbon steel. Why would someone go to that expense? As for 'magnetic stainless' try here. The relevent passage is

As for whether they are magnetic, the answer is that it depends. There are several families of stainless steels with different physical properties. A basic stainless steel has a 'ferritic' structure and is magnetic. These are formed from the addition of chromium and can be hardened through the addition of carbon (making them 'martensitic') and are often used in cutlery. However, the most common stainless steels are 'austenitic' - these have a higher chromium content and nickel is also added. It is the nickel which modifies the physical structure of the steel and makes it non-magnetic.

So the answer is yes, the magnetic properties of stainless steel are very dependent on the elements added into the alloy, and specifically the addition of nickel can change the structure from magnetic to non-magnetic.


Here is a table that list the martensitic stainless steels which are magnetic.

And you are just plain old dead wrong. mcoine is absolutely correct. You can't argue that there is no iron in steel. To use your analogy above, it would be like arguing that just because you call it a Snickers bar that it magically doesn't have peanuts in it. Give one to someone with a peanut alergy and you'll find out in a hurry that it does! Your argument falls apart all over the place. If you put 'gas' in your car is it gaseous or liquid. If you breath 'air' does that mean it doesn't have nitrogen, oxygen, CO2 and other stuff in it?

Lithium carbonate (another salt) has lithium in it. That's why we call it that but it sure as hell doesn't have lithium in the ground state in it.

The first planet of our solar system is named for a Greek God because of the speed of it's orbit, not because of the element mercury.

And, yes, his wife is wearing a carbon ring. One of several forms carbon can take when it is not combined with other elements and is in crystalline form. We call it diamond but that does not mean it isn't carbon.