Didn't know that cast steel and forged steel are the same. Now we can cast coil springs instead of taking all that time to draw wire and form them.
A spring is made from cast steel. A cast steel billet is first rolled into bars ( a type of forging) then it is rolled into round stock. Larger dia. springs are made directly from round stock, smaller are drawn to dia. (again a type of forging) then formed. Annealing is done after forging then normalization, harden then temper. A S&W frame starts as a cast steel billet, then is rolled and then forged to shape. Even a piece of flat steel bar was "forged" when it was rolled from a billet. The grain thing about forging is a joke. A forging requires the piece to be annealed and normalized after forging or it would have extreme grain growth because of the elevated temps required for forging and be way brittle. Annealing, normalizing, hardening and tempering resets the grain structure and type of grain anyway.
On another note castings of steel have came a long ways. Steel is no longer cast in an open hearth. Quality steel castings are first smelted in an induction oven in an inert atmosphere. Then poured. This allows for very high quality castings without the inclusions or slag from older methods and produce very high quality.
The best alloys are produced in similar furnaces but, instead of cast into billets the molten metal is sprayed in an inert atmosphere producing small particles of steel that are EXTREMELY uniform in alloy content. These are then heated to near melting temps then pressed into a solid billet. Near perfect steel billets with no stratification. You are more apt to make this type of steel worse by forging it and not better.
I make custom knives I both grind from flat bar and forge from bars or round stock. Forging has its own perils and requires careful controls not to destroy the steel in the process and to get its "grain" back into shape after the forging process causes it to have excessive grain growth. To forge you must raise the steels temp way above its critical temp to reshape. Temps above critical cause grain growth which is a bad thing, which must be reset by normalization before hardening and tempering.
Yes, I am a steel freak. I study it and learn about what REALLY happens in the processes. I know and converse occasionally with metallurgists and know and talk with some engineers on a regularly when I am working.
When did new processes become "BAD". We used to herald them. Just like MIM. 95% of the people who knock it don't actually have a real clue how it works or how good it is. I hear comment like it has plastic in it. LOL. Anything but the steel is long gone in the finished product. Ask an aerospace engineer what he thinks of MIM vs forged.
I cracks me up that guys who love S&Ws (I am one) which are forged recommend that if you want to shoot heavy loads to do it in a cast Ruger! Thompson uses castings and they are shooting high pressure rifle rounds regularly.
