I know exactly what you meant (any means that don’t require the destruction of covalent bonding) but the proper terminology is ‘by mechanical means’.

So now, describe a way to return steel to elemental iron in useable quantities without resorting to a chemical reaction. Sorry that may be an unfair challenge for any one but an alchemist.

I’m sure to some your argument may seem sound but as soon as I say the words Brass and Bronze it all crumbles to bits. No one calls these alloys of copper, just as no one except you calls steel iron.

You could spout all the technical stuff you want about solutions but if you call a piece of steel a solution people are going to look at you cross-eyed. Glass at STP is a liquid, so what. I’m not arguing that steel can’t be in chemical terms considered an iron solution, but it is misleading and doesn’t hold with normal convention.

Magnets stick to cheep cookware because it is stainless clad over carbon steel.



For mcoine…. By your reckoning, Fe = Iron, end of line.

What I am saying is that Iron is the name we use to describe a cast ferris metal that has either flake graphite or spherical graphite in it. And as such it is incorrect to say there is iron in steel. As though you were saying their are peanuts in a Snickers bar. You are not making the distinction between the chemists elemental name for Fe, Iron and the name we use in the real world for a specific product.

If you said, “I have a time delay hydrogen bomb” what would people think? That you had a gas filled balloon with a cigarette taped to it.

If your doctor prescribes lithium for your condition?

The first planet in our solar system is made of a liquid metal?

Is your wife sporting a carbon ring?

Is this all not germanium to the argument?

battle of the brains, uh-oh, and amen to Kirksville, Missouri, I've been there, NOT A LOT TO DO, at all

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.

You are now arguing in circles and your last statement made my point exactly, we call it diamond. And your wife is going to call it Diamond no mater how hard you jump around and flail your arms.

The planet Mercury has the same name as the element mercury no matter how fast you get your flowers. And the planet is not made of the element mercury even though they have the same name.

So just take your lithium and resign yourself to the fact that in the world of science and technology black is the absence of all light and white is the blending of all the colors of light. In kindergarten you mix all the colors together to get black and having no color is white.

WOW, you read all that?

I think that there are more viable solutions than Tide that work better and you probabally have in your house, like dawn. Just rinse it good. I am going to clean with oarnge peelz(pedros) only because I bought it already and havent tried anything else; Use this with one of the big scrub brushes for the chain(this does work good), get a can of cheapo engine degreaser on the rear cassette to spray off the gunk(I used white lightning in a can, works great but 8 bucks? For 2 bucks at autozone, I can get engine degreaser, rinse with a bottle of water or two, use the WD-40 trick for water displacement, wipe off, let dry, lubricate with white lightning, clean rear rims off if all that crap got on them. I havent tried this yet, but it sounds good to me. IMO, it beats disassembling the rear casette and breaking the chain.