Steel Bar Weight Chart (Pounds Per Foot)

How To Use This Steel Bar Weight Chart

Knowing what a bar of steel weighs saves you money and headaches. Steel is usually sold by the pound, so a weight chart lets you check that a supplier's price is fair, estimate shipping before you order online, and judge whether a project will be light enough to swing or heavy enough to matter.

The tables below cover mild steel (A36 hot-rolled, or common 1018) in the sizes a beginner actually buys: round and square bar from 1/8 in up to 2 in. Read down to your bar size, then across to the pounds-per-foot column, and multiply by your length in feet to get the total. For a 3 ft piece of 1/2 in round, that is 0.668 lb/ft times 3, or about 2 lb.

For an exact figure on any size or length, including tube and hex, use the steel bar weight calculator.

How The Weight Is Calculated

Every number here comes from one fact: steel has a density of about 0.2836 lb per cubic inch (7.85 g/cm^3). Weight is just volume times that density.

For round bar, the weight per foot equals diameter squared times 2.67. A 1 in round is 1 x 1 x 2.67 = 2.67 lb/ft. For square bar, the constant is 3.40 instead, because a square cross-section has more area than a circle of the same width. That is why a 1 in square (3.40 lb/ft) is about 27 percent heavier than a 1 in round.

These constants already bake in the 12 inches per foot and the density, so you only need the size. Diameter and side length are in inches; the answer comes out in pounds per foot.

Flat Bar Weight

Flat bar (also called flat stock or bar stock) is sized by width times thickness. There is no single chart for it because the combinations are endless, but the rule is simple: multiply width in inches by thickness in inches by 3.40 to get pounds per foot.

A piece of 2 in x 1/4 in flat is 2 x 0.25 x 3.40, which is about 1.70 lb/ft. The common sizes in the table below cover most beginner scrollwork, brackets, hooks, and hardware.

Flat bar is a forgiving place to start because it is cheap, easy to grip in tongs, and takes a lot of practice hammer blows before you use it up.

Does Knife Steel Weigh More?

For planning purposes, no. The carbon and alloy steels blacksmiths forge into knives and tools weigh essentially the same as mild steel. Common choices like 1084, 1095, 5160, and O1 all land within about one percent of 0.2836 lb per cubic inch, because they are mostly iron with only small amounts of carbon, manganese, or chromium.

So you can use these same mild-steel tables to estimate how much a knife billet or a bar of spring steel weighs. A 12 in length of 1/4 in x 1-1/2 in 1084 flat weighs about 1.3 lb, the same as mild flat of that size. If you are choosing a steel, the knife steel comparison covers how they forge, and heat-treating knife steel for beginners walks through hardening and tempering.

Buying Stock And Planning Projects

A weight chart turns a parts list into a shopping list. Once you know a project needs, say, 4 ft of 1/2 in square bar, the chart tells you that is about 3.4 lb (0.851 lb/ft x 4), so you can compare a per-pound scrap price against a cut-to-length online price.

Steel is often sold in 20 ft sticks at a steel yard, which is the cheapest way to buy but hard to haul home in a car. Many beginners start with 2 ft and 3 ft drops from a metal supermarket or online seller, paying more per pound for the convenience. Either way, weight is how the bill gets figured.

When you are picking what to make, the beginner blacksmith projects and first forging projects tools list pages pair well with this chart so you can size your stock before you buy.