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Found out the hard way that borax eats fire scale, but it also ate my forge liner
I was reading through an old copy of the Blacksmith's Gazette from 1993 at the library in Missoula and found a tip about sprinkling borax on hot steel to knock off fire scale. Tried it on a rail spike knife last Tuesday and the scale came off like magic, best finish I've ever gotten. But then I noticed the floor of my forge had crumbled into a gritty mess about the size of a dinner plate. Turns out borax flux melts into glass at forging temps and it just sat there chewing through my firebrick. I'm switching to an old trick of scraping with a wire brush at black heat instead, but has anyone else wrecked a liner this way?
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