That's like saying a pinch of salt in water make the water no longer water! The carbon exist as descrete carbon atoms which has only limited solubility in the iron itself. At 723C, the maximum solubility is reached at 0.02% in alpha ferrite and it is 2.08% at 1148 C in austenite. But in both cases the carbon is dissolved in the iron as a solution. You can go look at the phase diagram here. You will notice that throughout the diagram and text they refer to the carbon in the iron as a solution.

As for the blast furnace, carbon is added to reduce the iron ore to iron metal. The carbon conbines with the oxygen present in the ore to form carbon monoxide which will be outgassed from the ore, leaving you with a reduced iron with zero charge. The iron (with small amount of carbon contaminant) is then used for alloying with other metals to make steel. Even then, the 'steel' produced is iron with other stuff dissolved in it. It's physical properties have changed but the physical properties of all solution change from the solvent when a solute is added. If you look at a chart of iron alloys, you will find that the level of added materials add up to a very small percentage of the total mass.

I made a joke about using water based solvents and components containing iron. Steel contains iron and is, for all intents and purposes, iron itself. It rusts, is magnetic, has similar properties and is almost pure elemental iron. Someone with a degree in metallurgy should know this. To say that there isn't iron in steel is far from misleading, it is in fact untrue. Just because something is dissolved in the iron and that some of the physical properties have changed doesn't mean doesn't mean that the iron went away. It is still there. Even if you were to form new compounds between iron and say oxygen (rust) the iron is still there. The form has changed but the element is still present.

The steel is a solution, a solid solution, but a solution nevertheless. It happens to be a solid but there is nothing that says a solution can't be any of the physical forms of matter. You can have liquid solutions, gaseous solutions, solid solutions and plasma solutions. The physical properties of the solutions change with the addition of solute but the components still retain their identity because they are not chemically bound together.

You also need to work on your reading comprehension. I did not say that the components could be removed by 'mechanical' means. I said they could be removed by physical means. Chemical bonds do not need to be broken. The alloying components can be remove by melting the steel. That is a physical process not a chemical one. For a simple analogy, think of milk. If you were to work hard enough at it you could remove all of the components of milk and end up with water and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you mixed them back together you would still end up with milk. Now look at an egg. Fry the egg. You have now done chemistry on the components. No physical means exists to reconstitute the egg. You can't get it back to yolk and albumin.

Steel is like milk. You can take the stuff out and put it back forever and you will still have an iron solution of components called steel. But if you do chemistry on it - say oxidize it - you don't have steel or iron (base metal anyway) anymore. You must do chemistry to get it back.


If I were to order 'iron' for an experiment and someone sent me a material that is 98%+ iron with some contaminants in it, I would still call it iron because, for all intents and purposes, it is iron. It will react like iron. It will conduct electricity like iron. It ductile like iron. It is maleable like iron. Steel is just a name that people use for dirty iron In fact, for the most part, there are fewer contanimants in steel then there are in common mineral water and we still call that water.

As a metallurgist, I would think that you would be very familiar with the periodic table since all but a handful of elements are metals. Sure we chemists use the periodic table a lot but we use just the upper right hand corner. The rest belongs to you guys.

If you will go back and reread what I wrote, I said that if you use water based solvents or detergents that you need to get the water away for components that can rust. Those components contain iron and will corrode, will they not? I did not derail this thread into a discussion about whether steel contains iron or not, did I?

When you put salt into water you no longer have fresh water.

We in the real world make a distinction between fresh water, brackish water and salt, or seawater. They are all water but are different enough to the creatures that live in them to be distinguished. You cannot for example put a cichlid in a marine tank and expect it to survive even though the salt is only in suspension in the water. A fish that breads in the brackish water at the mouth of a tributary can no longer propagate if the flow of runoff to the sea becomes restricted and the water becomes too salty. Their are exceptions to this, like the Salmon but that is not the norm. And even though the human body needs both water and salt to survive, one can not drink salt water.

In today’s world we make distinctions between materials and products with naming conventions. If you take a pound of iron to the recycler you will get a different price than if you take a pound of high carbon steel. We give them different names because they have different properties and are used for different things.

To a new age black smith who, through his art is keeping an ancient tradition and skill alive there is a world of difference between steel and an iron blades.

Beyond the transformation from pig iron to steel there are other processes that change the very nature of steel without changing it more than very slightly on the elemental level. Carbon steel can be case hardened (surface hardened) and with the addition of traces of manganese and silicon can be further hardened by heat treatment.
Steel can be hardened by quenching from high temps in a variety of different bathes, brine, oil etc. It can be aged at very low temperatures to impart different qualities to it like better machining characteristics etc. All these steps change the steel and with every change the nomenclature of the steel changes also.

When we order a tube set for a bike we ask for 4130, Tange, Prestige etc. we don’t ask the supplier for some iron tubes. Even angle iron isn’t really iron, it is low carbon steel.

If you call a steel supplier and say I want steel, they will ask if you want cold rolled or hot rolled steel. If you ask for iron, they will most likely say we don’t carry iron pipe try a pluming supply. If it is a very large supplier and they do carry iron product, the question then becomes do you want cast gray (graphite flakes added for machinability) or cast ductile iron (nodular iron, or SG iron for strength). Cast iron is the nomenclature for Fe that has been alloyed with carbon and silicon and has graphite added. It is supplied as cast.

We can get into the minutiae all you want but in the end, steel is a solution of iron and other metals and nonmetals. To say that steel contains no iron (a statement you have made) is wrong. Plain and simple. No chemical reaction nor atomic tranmogrification has taken place to make the iron something else. It is still iron. It may not have the same properties as pig iron (which, by the way is the iron from the blast furnace which already has carbon in it) but it is still iron.


And as for water with salt in it, it is still water. It has something which has modified its properties but it is still mostly water. Simple physical methods will make it water again, just like relatively simple methods will make steel iron again.

I did change your wording “physical means” to the more physics text correct “Mechanical means” and didn’t feel it was necessary to point it out to every one, but since you mention it.

Just to be sure I’m not misleading any one I am not a metallurgist by trade it was just one of the rungs on the academic ladder oh so many years ago.

For all of the rest of you that are reading along, I hope you are having as much fun as we are.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I am arguing on the side of proper naming conventions and wanting to refer to things as to how they are used, and he is arguing on the side of the nature of things and wants to call a jack a jack, regardless of how many eyes are showing, and no mater whether it is in a bridge deck or a poker deck.

So here you have two guys that both love to play devils advocate and are probably both laughing while standing and sprinting for the line, I know I am.

Every discipline has it quirks and preferences and magnets do mostly stick to stuff made from ferrous metals except for, ta-dah Stainless steel.

The elite forces use survival knives that by specification are to be non magnetic so their options are stainless steel a poor choice and magnesium a really poor choice. I think mostly they chose mag because its so much lighter and they don’t care that it wont hold an edge because they never have to cut any thing with it.

After reading all of this I have made a decision. I am going back to work, I need to rest my brain a little.

So, will tide hurt the bike or not?

In changing the wording you have shown that you don't understand what I meant. Mechanical means can mean physical means during separation of materials to obtain the components. For example, using forceps to remove pepper from a salt and pepper mixture. But in a chemical sense, physical means are any methods that don't require the breaking of chemical bonds. In the salt and pepper example above, that would mean adding water to remove the salt and leaving the pepper behind. The salt could then be recovered by evaporating the water. For steel, this could mean resmelting it to remove the added materials. Not being in the business of regularly recovering stuff from molten metals, I'm not sure how to do it but it could be done with physical methods alone.

You are thinking physics and I was talking about the physical world - not physics.

The naming conventions for iron alloys are not universally applied to all alloys. Steel is just a short hand word applied to iron solutions. You could just as easily call 316 stainless steel, 316 stainless iron. Iron alloys are the only metal alloys that I can think of where you don't use the name of the base metal. Aluminum, titanium, gold, silver, zinc, copper, etc are all refered to as the base metal and usually a number for the grade. You certainly wouldn't say that 7075 aluminum isn't aluminum would you? A Specialized M4 frame is said to be an aluminum frame eventhough it would more properly be called a ceramic reinforced aluminum matrix. It's not even a solution but an heterogeneous mixture of metal and boron fiber. But we still call it aluminum. 14 carat gold isn't called anything other than gold even though it has been alloyed with other metals to improve its strength. It's still called gold.

Magnets stick to some grades of stainless steel. Grades with more nickel in them (as mentioned previously) are not magnetic. Others are. Try sticking a magnet to any appliance that has a stainless steel cover and you find them all magnetic. They all have low nickel contents.

And what, exactly, does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

We are really veering off course now

Bottom line: Yes, you can wash your bike with detergent (if the original poster is even still hanging around). Dry the bike and relube the chain and any other bits that have iron in them (aka steel bits). Don't let water sit on these bits too long or they will rust, just like any other iron bits (aka steel bits) would.

the fact is you said "there is no iron in steel"

that is completely dead wrong, and just about every 6th grader knows this.

No. Most household detergents are mild enough not to cause any damage to the paint or components. Just dry and relube the chain (where most of the steel bits reside). If I were washing my bike - something I don't do very often - I'd probably take the chain off and clean it in a solvent bath anyway, reinstall and then relube it. Thank you Sram for the masterlink which make this all soooo much easier

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.

At least with Tide your ride will smell like a "Fresh Spring Meadow"! LOL