Maybe you're looking for an answer of how we know how much carbon there is in a particular bloom or billet.

When I smelt iron sand into a bloom, as it's called, there's varying degrees of carbon infused all over and through the bloom. I chop up the bloom and spark test the different pieces. Depending on how much carbon there is, the spark will look different starting from a short dull streak and gradually adding more and more forks in the spark until it looks like a mini firework and then back to long dull sparks and then short ones again.

In the early days, smiths and foundrymen probably didn't explicitly know it's about carbon content, but relied on feel and observation, the sparkly bloom makes the stronger sword etc.

Let's start with a die (as in dice). It's a cube with four corners and 6 faces with dots. Even if we made a blank die, we still have the 4 corners and 6 faces.

Iron, or ferrite, has a crystalline structure just like this blank die, with one atom at each corner forming a cube. Since it's also hollow inside that cube, there's one more packed in atom. This is called a body centered cube.

Now I take that die and I heat it up until it's white hot in a fire and the energy moves things around and the little atom in the middle pops out when the cube expands and vibrates. Now it settles back on the face of the cube making a die with just one dot on one face. This is austenite, and the structure is face centric now.

We can pack one atom on each face making dice with all one faces, which is awesome! With all of those atoms, the inside of the cube is too small for another iron so it's empty for the moment. When I toss that dice back into the fire though, a smaller carbon atom is able to slip in past the one dot faces and fill the center. Now we have an alloy of iron and carbon.

If threw a dense box of iron dice all neatly packed into the fire, the whole thing can heat up and change from ferrite (body centric) to austenite (face centric) but the carbon can only penetrate so far into the box because it has to move from one die center to another. This is basically "carburizing" a steel billet. If we fill every single die with carbon, the box will be too full and break open, so there's a sweet spot of how much carbon we want.

The way we made steel for a long time was to blow hot air into "the box" of molten dice and introduce lots of carbon into the iron, making "pig iron." Then the pigs were remelted without carbon present, ejecting lots of carbon as the cubes opened up aiming for some percentage of carbon between 1 and 3%.

There's is absolutely a difference between all of the percentages. I think of them as low carbon (mild) steel, high carbon, and cast; but this is a huge oversimplification. Cast alone has ductile, white, and grey varieties each with different properties. High carbon could be 0, A, W, D, white/blue/hitachi varieties again with different properties. Low carbon steel could be wrought or mild. Wrought iron has lots of silica in it as a flux agent and is no longer really made, but is desirable for it's properties to the right person.

As for ductility, no pressure on knowing that term specifically. I know you understand the concepts. In my mind, you could think of ductility as the ability to stretch without tearing like pizza dough, you want a really glutenous dough to make a big pizza. Malleability is a quality referring to bendyness, spaghetti is not malleable until it's cooked and then it's very malleable. Also, machinability is the ability to cut it down cleanly, room temp kerrygold butter has supreme machinability, ice has no machinability. Weldability is another quality, a gummy bear can have it's head reattached with a lick, but you can't put a sliced apple together again.

As an aspiring metalworker who forges, smelts, machines, and welds... I think about this stuff a lot.

Truth.

House of Leaves - Circa Survive.

Yeah, backer rod is what I was thinking. It's basically the same thing as the weather strip tubes, different sections of the store for sure.

I guess I grew up using caulk as a general term for anything that covered a joint, be it silicon or traditional stuff. OP should choose their goop for their situation.

Maybe put some weather strip in first then caulk over? I'd probably look into plumbers putty as another option that can take caulk over it.

Dude, get the Bandcamp app and pick a genre, listen to the front page, or the radio shows. It'll never get old. From Bandcamp's newer stuff, really into Stella.

Also, Frances the Mute or anything Mars Volta, and wildcard pick: Alpha Mist.

They're magnetic right? That part is cool. I haven't really ever found use for the other finger toggles, but have many claw hand friends that rank or whatever it's called these days.

I need an Xbox controller for Witcher 3, for some reason, the stream controller doesn't swap when swimming and similar situational shifts on that game - I did buy it on GOG and run in big picture.

But in no way are they comparable unless the d pad is touch? Seriously, flicking the ball camera, swirl to scroll, 15 button touch menu that can be a squares or radial, macro 4 way directions...

Seriously if you haven't dived into what it does, especially with haptics, it's too late. It really was just an incredible controller. I say was, I still have mine and find new ways to play more ergonomically. No Xbox controller though, still a favorite for fps.

I was craving a tower defense game some time ago and discovered the series. I adored 1, savored every minute and just picked up 3 on sale. It's a really novel concept and the community maps are wild.

Together we stand! Mortars at the ready!

Totally, I played 90% of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream with a mouse, and then replayed with the steam controller with a good map, and enjoyed it much more.

Also Grim Fandango, Ultima Underground, Magic Carpet 2, the entire MYST series, Creeper World 1, Worms. I really loved it for Half Life 1 and System Shock, flicking the right pad is very useful and intuitive in those games.

Notable controls to mention as well, the swirl to scroll for long text based games is HUGE.

As a retro/80s/90s mostly gamer, I would love another controller. I love the options to play point and clicks, RTS, and other genres very effectively, better than keyboard and mouse most of the time.

Just fired up Creeper World 3 and made an awesome map that has all of the units mapped to the touch pad and joy stick and it's really smooth.

My favorite controller for sure, sorry GameCube. But it's strengths are really about non fps games.