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Hot take: learning to read the fire by color is better than chasing exact temps
Six months back I watched a guy in his 60s pull a perfect orange-yellow heat on a leaf spring at his forge in Asheville and he never once looked at a thermometer. I had been staring at my own temp gauge for two years and still burning steel, so I ditched it for a month and just watched the colors, and my scaling problem dropped way off. Is this something you all teach new folks, or does it depend on what you're forging?
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walker.rowan21d ago
My first forge teacher in rural Kentucky used to say the temp gauge was for people who didn't trust their own eyes, then he'd squint at a piece of 1080 and call the color within 50 degrees every time. I tried the same thing on some 5160 last spring and cooked it past non-magnetic without even noticing because I was too busy watching the color shift in the shade vs sunlight. Turns out the trick is watching the shadow line on the steel, not the color itself, since bright sun will lie to you every time. Does the color method hold up for you when you're working outside versus in a dim shop?
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