Hardened Steel at Home, the Dummy Method

DIYer's brazing hearth

Most times that our staffers nominate someone for a DotD, they run a quick check at the source to see what other stupidity, if any (and there's usually more), the freelancer has floating around the internet. The staffer who found J. Johnson a couple of days ago at eHow.com did just that, and they were amazed at Johnson's back catalog of dumbassery. So amazed, in fact, that they urged us to bring J. back after just a couple of days so we could share her moronic approach to "How to Strengthen Steel," which lives at Hunker.com.

This is one of the rare occasions in which we found a comment preserved on an eHow post, a comment that disappeared sometime between 2012 and 2016, according to the Wayback Machine at archive.org¹. The comment starts out by saying, "Wow, so much wrong..." We concur!
We concur because it's pretty obvious that Johnson Googled "strengthen steel" (or, more likely, went straight to Wikipedia). Once there, she proceeded to lift a few factoids about the hardening process and attempt to fit them into a DIY rubric. The result was, as the kids say, "Epic fail." Of course, you can't expect much expertise from a freelancing English major who thinks that the process she's describing is,

"...a specific type of heating process known as hardening and tampering [sic]."

That was what caught our staffer's eye in the first place, What followed was little better. According to Johnson, you must,

"Surround a brazing heart [sic] that is large enough to hold your steel material with fire bricks... Place the steel on the heart [sic] and heat it up with a propane torch."

J.'s next step is to quench the steel, a step she says is,

"Remove the steel when it gets red hot and cool it with water."

And she finishes with air cooling, which – we guess – is a reasonable approximation of the tempering... err, "tampering" process. Of course, Johnson's requires introduction said that,

"Many things throughout your home are likely made of steel. However, not all of them need to be overly strong. When steel is being used to support a structure or other heavy object, the stronger it is, the more you will be able to trust it..."

Again, nominally true, but let's be real here, J.: How many of your readers are likely to harden and temper steel for use in their house? No, this question obviously arose from some seventh-grader's homework assignment about the industrial revolution and steel-making. Small wonder our staffer found this hilarious enough to give Johnson her second Dumbass of the Day award in less than a week!

Johnson was so clueless she couldn't even copy "hearth" and "tempering" from her resource. Any doubts?

¹ Check out the very first capture of Johnson's post using the URL ehow.com/how_8698478_strengthen-steel.html

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