In news:672pg.110246$H71.2112@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com,
Bryan Olson <fakeaddress@nowhere.org> typed:

Amanda Angelika wrote:

A gas cooker flame is around 800C. These flames regularly come into
contact with Steel, Copper and aluminium cookware for sustained
periods without having any adverse affect on the metal at all.

The cookware never gets as hot as the flame, because the heat
gets conducted away. And how would you know if it has lost half
its strength?

You can hold a pin in a candle flame and get it to glow red and
loose stiffness.

Well actually mild steel tends to harden when subjected to heat, but will
lose it's tensile strength if overheated and become brittle. I know this
since as an artist. I once made some specialist wood engraving tools from
4in mild steel nails shaped them using a file and tempered the tips over a
domestic gas stove. You see a spectrum of colours when you heat a nail in
that way and have to cool it in water when the tip hits blue.

You can't say all steel would lose half it's strength at 650C since there
are many different types of steel with different levels of carbon and even
other metals which  can be made to respond to heat in different ways.

The steel used in the construction of the WTCs was a special steel
with a higher melting point than ordinary steel somewhere around
3000C.

Not even close. Let's see you try to cite that one to a
non-kook source. (Even kook sites are saying 2800 degrees
Fahrenheit or less, which is 1538C.)

That's the melting point of Iron, steel is an alloy and has different
poperties to Iron.

-- 
Amanda