Pre atom bomb iron

[Hepotec]

I have access to about two tons of cast iron that was made before the second world war. It has been buried for a century or more.

I know that some scientific instruments can only be made from such metal, but does this have any practical application to knifemaking? Would it be of interest to anyone?

[Colin KC]

Hep, it does have some use, but only limited.

Too high a carbon content for forging, mostly used for a "quick fix" smelt with pure iron to make steel

[MarkP]

Where I worked loooong ago, they used to buy up steel from old ships to use for screening whole-body radiation monitors. The idea was to shove people into a box with a very low radiation background, achieved via a sandwich of steel and lead (the steel absorbs secondary x-rays caused by Rutherford scattering in the lead, IIRC).

I don't know if cast iron is much good for that sort of thing. And if you smelt it, don't you lose the low-radioactivity feature?

[dtalbot]

Yep,
Before moving into management I was an analytical radiochemist, old steel is very much sought after for making shieds for stuff like trace level gamma spectrometers, if you find the right buyer it may be worth a bit