I am certainly no expert at examining micrographs, but I understand that it is an exceptionally challenging thing draw conclusions from. Must take a lot of experience to understand what is being viewed.

I know that metallurgists have always had difficulty with measuring grain size in a polished and etched sample. The sample only allows viewing the 3 dimensional grain on a single plain. Its sort of like sawing through a block of frozen soup and trying to determine the size of the pieces of vegetables by looking at what has been revealed in that single view. You dont know what has been removed by slicing through the sample and you dont know what lies below the viewed surface.

Drew is correct that the silica stretching may have occurred during any part of the mechanical distortion of the wrought iron material. It could go all the way back to the shingling process to make the wrought iron.

It seems to me that making a determination of what happened to a piece of steel by looking at a micrograph, is like trying to describe all of history by looking at a single snap-shot in time.

Steve Culver
Steve Culver Knives