Aldo's 52100

J

JMJones

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Jul 14, 2010
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Has anyone been working with this lately? What are you doing for heat treat? I remember hearing a ways back that it needed some additional steps (not talking about the triple quenching stuff) but that was a while ago and wondered how people are doing it now?

Thanks

John
 
If your talking about stock removing and not forging I'd run it through a few thermal cycles before heat treating to help refine the grain. I haven't messed with it, but I imagine it came out of the rollers pretty hot and needs a series of reducing heats to repair the grain and prepare it for heat treat. That said, if I was to mess with it the first thing I'd do is make a couple of test blades and see what happens and go from there.
 
Thermal cycles alone will not address the issue that Aldo's 52100 had (still has?). It needed (still needs?) a good normalizing heat, because it was so heavily spheroidized from the mill. The normalizing helps to break up the spheroidial carbides that had such a high bond with their carbon. 1650F-1700F. Then the subsequent thermal cycles (around critical ~1475f) help to "shrink" the aus grain that may have been enlarged by the normalizing heat. Then on to hardening/quench/temper.

I have no idea if Aldo's current 52100 is still heavily spheroidized like it was. Because of that issue, I normalize and cycle his 1084, 80CrV2, 1095, W2, and 52100, for piece of mind. Chuck at Alpha Knife has 52100 that is ready to harden as received.

I also would like to know if the coarse spheroidizing is still going on. It's nice to have the steel ready to harden when you receive it, and not have normalizing/cycle the stuff.
 
Stu has it right. I always assume that there is a mixed structure in every bar of steel I get. I am not sure about Chuck's steel but unless it has has been properly thermal cycled, you have some work to do to get it there. In fact, even if Chuck guaranteed me it was thermal cycled, I would still do it myself... and I have no reason to doubt Chuck's word.
 
So do you guys thermal cycle every piece of steel you use? If so, when?

I sat in a integral seminar by Edmund Davidson at ICCE and its leading me to think I need to be doing everything. Even stainless stock removal stuff. Due to all the stresses from different stages of manufacturing.

I guess my question pertains more towards how you guys treat your stainless steels. Everything I forge gets thermal cycled. I don't mean to thread hijack, I might just start a new thread down the road.
 
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Thermal cycling is done to make the microstructure more uniform and to reduce the grain size .It will also minimize warping. It is then first part of HT that you should do.
 
I have zero experience with stainless... but I believe the CPM steels are as good as you can get prior to hardening. I would also speculate(keyword) that the majority of stainless stock has undergone some sort of annealing process, since most are air hardening.
 
I don't thermal cycle every piece of steel. (I send stainless out to Peter's, as my kiln is maxed out at 1750f). The O7 from Germany, another carbon steel I love to use, is ready to harden as received. It's grain structure is extremely extremely fine as is. And no need to normalize it, either, as it is "fine" spheroidized from the mill, as opposed to "coarse" spheroidized like Aldo's steels.

CFV is another steel that I don't bother normalizing or cycling on stock removal. I think Crucible and Niagara have done a good job with it.
 
According to one of Aldo's employees he has fixed the issue with the 52100 and it no longer needs the normalizing cycles. I've always had better luck with Chuck's 52100.
 
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