Malleable iron or cast iron

Joe W.

Member
I am looking for wagon steps for horse drawn wagons. Ebay has many but most are listed as cast iron steps. My book of historic horse drawn wagon hardware shows steps of steel and malleable iron. No cast iron. I suspect the "antique" wagon steps listed on Ebay are incorrectly labeled as cast iron and are probably malleable iron or steel but I am not sure. I don't know how to tell the difference in a photo of malleable or cast iron. Were any historic wagon or tractor steps made of cast iron? I think they would be too brittle to support a sudden thrust of a heavy person jumping up or down on a step. If I did this cut/paste stuff right, a photo of the steps I am wanting, if they are malleable iron, is attached.
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I'm not sure this is the answer you're looking for, but here it goes. "Cast" anything is a process, not a type of metal, whether the mold is made from sand, a crucible, or some kind of metal, what you pour into it is the finished product whether it be iron (ductile, grey, malleable, etc) steel or aluminum. I've worked in a foundry for along time and have worked with all three of the before mentioned irons, and now manganese steel, both melt & mold, and whatever fell out of the mold at shakeout we call "cast iron", except steel. How this helps on buggy steps purchases I don't know, but if they're genuine antique my thought would be: they held people before they oughta hold people now. I have a pair from something mand of wood, probably a wagon, I would not be afraid to use and I'm around 250. Hope this helps. DP
 
Agreed--lots of design cues there to indicate they were cast--lots of detail that would be cost-prohibitive to machine or form on a mass-produced object, rounded surfaces for ease of mold release, exterior surface roughness from a sand mold, etc. etc. Others that I can't easily see in the picture would be sprue marks (often a round raised cut-off cylinder) on the back side indicating where the metal was poured into the mold or parting lines showing where two halves of the mold were joined. Not all of these would show in every single cast part, of course, depending on the exact method of casting and the amount of post-casting work done to it, but taken in their totality they would all point toward a part that has been cast rather than formed from bar or round stock.
 
Malleable or cast there is not that much difference between the 2 Cast does not weld as good as malleable will. Both would and can be poured into a form to cast parts. As Dpittman said,if they held before they would probably hold today.
 
Dpittman, you nailed it. Casting is the process used to make the parts. Malleable, ductile, etc. are the materials. You could do it with plaster, it would still be a casting.
 

Australian antique shops have been flooded with so called '' Genuine '' cast artifacts from China for almost fifteen years now . It is extremely difficult to judge the authenticity of some , especially from photographs .
Some local E Bay dealers repaint them , others leave them to weather and oxidise . Recently a range of cast iron cookware reached the market , many were sold as genuine to the unsuspecting , the worst of it was that the iron it was made from was full of impurities injurious to health . Some people have no sense of responsibility .
Besides cookware , tractor seats and vintage novelty money boxes feature highly on the fake circuit .
 
Malleable iron isn't really a material that can be cast; a malleable iron object begins as an iron casting that cooled very rapidly so that it solidifies as "white iron" (very hard and brittle), and is then held at a red heat long enough for the graphite crystals re-form themselves into spheres. The time and energy required to transform the white iron casting into a malleable iron casting are expensive, enough so that very little malleable iron is produced today.

In today's world, "ductile iron" takes the place of malleable iron for most things that, a hundred years ago, would have been malleable iron. Ductile iron is significantly tougher than gray cast iron, but like gray cast iron it can be cast. (If I recall correctly, ductile iron is made by adding magnesium to a ladle of molten gray iron, but it's been a LONG time since I took that class.)
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Thanks for all of the replies. I bought the pair of steps. As some of you pointed out, if the steps were strong enough to hold people back in the day they should hold people now. We'll see.
 

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