A question has just come up in my little office regarding a colour chart for hot steel, as in the various colours from dull reds through orange and yellow etc etc.

We have all manner of measuring instruments (infra-red thermometers, pyrometers, thermocouples etc etc) but nothing quite surpasses the speed of the human eye in looking for colour variation (and thus temp variation) on billet moving at speed in our rolling mill!

Anybody got a link to a useful chart on the net?

Think this is the one you are after....Temperature colour chart:

http://members.optushome.com.au/terrybrown/HeatTemperChartEtc.html

Thats also got the temper colours on too.

David

[Edited on 24/2/05 by flak monkey]

That's exactly what we needed!!!

Thanks!!!

(funnily enough we were discussing temper colours on mill rolls too so that's also useful!!)

NS Dev - so you roll toolsteel?

That chart applies only to high carbon steel such as D2. The steel running through a mill is usually low-medium carbon. Not much difference but there is some...

Out of interest how do you know its for tool steel?

We have been doing all this stuff in our materials and tooling courses. I know there are differences in the temps for different steels. Just come back from a lecture on tool steels...!

David

yes, we roll a lot of toolsteel, but also a lot of lower carbon stuff too.

The material we were looking at at the time in question was 4140 oilfield toolsteel tubing. (well, it was solid billets about to become tubing!!)