people think that stuff like wrought iron or cast iron are like, relatively pure iron, and steel is made by carefully adding in stuff
but both of those actually have way more carbon content than even carbon steel
getting pure iron is actually really hard, almost all iron stuff has a significant and uncontrolled amount of carbon in it
carbon steel has a very low and controlled carbon content
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oh stainless also contains nickel
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Nickel is added into a lot of steel smelts to increase the strength of it.
I hate it, but that's because my job is to turn, drill, and bore into different kinds of steel, and the more nickel in the alloy, the worse time I'm going to have!
@Felthry cast iron is so shitty
@starkatt the reason iron tools displaced bronze was not because they were better; bronze of the time was much superior to cast iron, which is pretty much all they had at the time. it was instead because iron is really easy to get
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@Felthry today I learned!
@starkatt actually much superior might be overselling it--it had its advantages and disadvantages
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@starkatt the point is, it wasn't some clearly superior technology, and actually arguably worse--it was just far cheaper
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now, alloy steels are a different story, they're made by adding in stuff to carbon steel, usually some manganese and sometimes chromium (for stainless steel) or vanadium
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