I'm rather new to this handcuff collecting. I've gone through all this forum, found many interesting things, but can't find anything about this.
Why are some old English handcuffs stamped "Warranted Wrought" but others are not? Also, the numbers stamped on the cuffs and keys. What do those stand for? I know these are stupid questions, but I'd like to know.
Wrought has two meanings in steelwork. It describes a material, wrought iron, and it describes the process of smithing iron or steel.
First quality ("Best") cuffs would be made from steel, as it can be hardened. Wrought would be roughly equivalent to our designation of Forged. It distinguished the cuffs from those made of cast iron or cast brass. The former would be brittle. The latter would be soft. It would also distinguish them from cuffs made from strap irom, like those Indian Darbies that flood eBay. But a cursory visual inspection would do that, too.
Hard would indicate that the steel had been hardened. That would be done by heating the finished piece red hot and quenching it, generally in water but sometimes in oil or brine. I suspect the cuffs would also be tempered by reheating the hardened piece to the right temperature for the hardness desired. This was often done by color. Oops, they're British cuffs - by colour.
Wrought iron as a material, is the stuff of common smith work. It contains impurities, mostly in the form of silicates, left over from the ironmaking process that leave the metal with a grain structure akin to wood. The grain is very plain in old, deteriorated wrought iron. Wrought iron forge welds like nothing else, and so is the holy grail of modern smiths. It's been almost completely eliminated by modern, industrial process steels, and is now hard to get. Nice as it is, wrought iron does not harden. You need steel for that.
Steel was cheap enough in the 19th Century that it would be the material of choice for making cuffs. I would expect to see more wrought iron in 17C work and older, as steel was too expensive, back then.
