One of my life’s little pleasures is a text-MUD I’ve been playing in for some time, Inferno. One of the reasons I like it is because you don’t have to kill anything to make a living; my character, for example, is a weaponsmith. Wanting to bone up a bit for verisimilitude, I did a lot of Google-searching for things blacksmithing and learned enough to sound like I know what I’m talking about in the game.
Now, blacksmiths don’t really melt steel, they simply heat it to the point where it is more or less pliable – one smith-poet had the phrase “it moves like clay between the hammer and the anvil” – and forge it into shape. Steel is for the main part an alloy of iron and carbon and even if it’s bound with iron, the carbon burns just fine. More than one site mentioned setting their work on fire when it was left too long in the fire. Apparently it’s quite spectacular.
Yet we’ve all seen pictures and movies/videos of steel mills with their hearths being tapped and incandescent metal flowing out like water into ladles to be transported somewhere else for further processing. Can any metallurgists out there explain why a smith has to worry about his billet catching fire yet a producer can heat the stuff to where it runs? Does the carbon burn during processing* then stop as the mass cools? Or is there something esoteric I’m missing?
*I’m not talking the step in the process where a lance is lowered into the mass and oxygen blown through it. Obviously the carbon here is being burned deliberately.