You don’t have to pre-make the invar; you just have to make sure not to add the chromium until after the iron and nickel have fused into invar at 2011k ( and there’s no extra nickel ). When I went to make the metric ass-ton of stainless steel to build the distillation tower this time, I used a large steel crucible and threw in 140 magnetite, 30 carbon dust, let it heat up to 1811K where it reduced to 60 iron, then added the 10 nickel, waited for it to hit 2011K and turn the iron into wrought and some invar, then tossed in the 10 chromium and manganese. Worked like a charm and I was free to mess about with other things for several minutes while a pair of fluidized bed invar burning boxes heated the large crucible, then killed them and used a small invar liquid burning box burning creosote oil to gently maintain the temperature while half a dozen redstone controlled molds poured and auto hoppered out the plates. Very handy. When using a regular crucible, just divide by 10, and be sure to put out the fire as soon as the stainless forms and watch that it doesn’t melt the crucible before actually going out then quickly pincer out all of the stainless before it cools. Do NOT try to continuously add ingredients one or two at a time as you pour out one or two stainless at a time like you can do when making bronze.
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