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Does anyone have any personal experience with it? I sure don't, plenty of experience with it's alloys though. I've read it is very soft, just wondering how it would weld and machine. Does anyone know of any use for the pure stuff?

Bill

Perhaps you could explain what it is. Neither Google not Wikipedia returns anything for "OURE" iron. Did you mean "PURE"?

What's "OURE" iron?

Bill

Iron (Fe) is used in steel making but requires other component to make it useful. By itself, I am not sure what use it has. You can seach Pig Iron for more info.

Pig iron has already been smelted in a furnace and contains a high carbon content. I don't know of any direct uses for pure iron.

Maybe as a vitamin supplement

I used to machine cast iron pistons for commercial A/C compressors about 30 years ago. Dusty nasty mess. We had to use ceramic inserts to cut with. Carbide eroded too quickly. Don't use coolant - you'll have mud all over the place.

Weding cast iron is very tricky (I.E. engine blocks). I'm not a pro welder, but I know you have to pre-heat it before attemping a weld, and the success rate is very low. Brazing is a better option

Supplements are iron containing salts: ferrous sulfate, ferrous fumarate and ferrous gluconate.

"Cast iron" is an alloy of iron, Fe, and carbon, C, with the carbon content greater than 2% by weight.

True wrought iron, which to the best of my knowledge has not been commercially made for many years now, is the closest material you're likely to find to "pure" iron. Other than that it is all alloys, with the next closest today probably being 1005 steel or some such very low carbon steel. I think pure iron should weld just fine, but don't believe it would machine very well at all.

Why do you ask about Iron specifically? The vast majority of metals we are familiar with are not actually "pure" but are rather some alloy of it.

Adding to Driven5's comments, wrought iron iron found considerable use in transition of shipbuilding from wood to steel (both for framing and plating, not to mention rivets), happily so since early steels were often prone to brittle fracture - although riveted seams were some protection against that. Of course, as noted above, wrought iron isn't 'pure iron', but was the closest one got to it in an engineering sense. With better steels (and even garden variety 1010 steel is way better than the materials of old, although not necessarily very notch-tough at low temperature) the use of wrought iron faded away - especially since steel became cheaper (and better).

Wikipedea has a nice summary.

Why do you ask about Iron specifically? The vast majority of metals we are familiar with are not actually "pure" but are rather some alloy of it.

I am fascinated by iron because it is common yet we know so little about it. I sometimes wonder if I would recognize a bar of pure iron. Wikipedia says it is softer than aluminum. Almost useless in its pure form, but its alloys are indispensable. While it is true most metals are usually used in some form of alloy, they are often used in a commercially pure form. That is not true of iron.

Bill

I'm no expert but I seem to recall from my welding class that iron doesn't even come out of the ground in pure form. Iron ore is mostly other mineral compounds that contain iron. To get pure iron you'd probably have to go through some kind of expensive extraction process.

Well all I can say on this is thank you for answering the question. After spending a lot of time on Wikipedia after reading this thread, I have learned a lot of stuff about Iron that I previously did not know. Fascinating stuff!

Thanks!

Pure iron is rare in nature. It is usually mined in some mineral form, either hematite, magnetite, or limonite, or one of the iron carbonate forms. The extraction process is usually some form of smelting, or heating to drive off the other compounds. It can get expensive, depending on the mineral.

JD Kemp
Prof Geologist Reg # 1990