Aneal Hardened- is there sucha process?

[Matt Shade]

My parents just bought a new truck for hauling our horse trailer with ( 4 door F350 daully, 4x4, its got the powerstroke diesel and everything, man I love this tuck! ) any how I was checking out the 5th wheel hitch on it and the ball is kind of straw colored. I asked my dad if it was some kind of coating or if it had been case hardened (figured they wanted really high surface hardness to resist wear, but the inside has to be softer to make it tough enough)
My dad said that it was aneal hardened. Which was an oxymoron to me because all the times I've heard the term aneal, it had to do with softening the metal. But he claimed that you could harden with an anealing furnace and it was completely different than normal hardening. So has anyone else heard of this? Or has my dad mixed up a few of the things his dad taught him ?(my grandpa was a tool and die worker).
Thanks for any help. I'm not going to argue this with him but I'm kind of curious about it.

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It'll feel better when it stops hurting.

 

[Howard Clark]

I think your Dad is confused. You can of course use any heat source to harden a piece of steel if it will get hot enough. The yellow/straw color on the ball s very likely a cadmium coating on the ball to inhibit corrosion.

The balls for 5th wheel hitches (and the king pins under all semi-trailers at the front) are not hardened, not in the same sense that we think of hardened in terms of a knife blade. They are generally forged from medium to low carbon steel (1030 or 1035 is the most common) because they have to be welded in place using an electrical arc welding method. High carbon steel has trouble with that process without using a whole bunch of special care and attention to details, so it is mostly just not used for any application where welding is an option. IF it (the ball) is hardened at all, it would be a case hardeneing situation with the surface of the ball carburized to a higher carbon lervel than the rest, then quenched. However I think that very unlikely. I have never seen a hardened one.

 

[Rick Leeson]

Take a couple of strokes accross the ball with a good file. I will bet the ball is not hard and will cut easy with the file.

BlacksmithRick@aol.com

 

[Matt Shade]

oops, guess I shouldn't have said 5th wheel. I got into the habit of saying that around non truck/trailer people because they don't know what I mean by goose neck.
It doesn't have a king pin like a 5th wheel does. Instead, theres a receiver bolted underneath the bed directly to the frame that you drop in a special 2 5/8" ball insert into. The ball itself is attatched to about an 8" long box shaped peice of steel with holes in it the receiver locks into. Its one of those deals where you flip a lever inside the wheel well to release it and then you can turn it upside down while your not using it. It apears to be a one peice job, I'm guessing either cast or machined, no welding involved but I could be wrong. Anyway the whole insert is the same straw color.
Sounds like theres no such thing as aneal hardened. I don't know wether its hardened or coated though now. It would make a lot of sense for the outside to be hardened and polished for wear resistance and to make the ball turn more smoothly inside the hitch.
Yeah, taking a file to it would be one way to find out but I'd rather not do that. Not only would my dad have trouble understanding why I did it, I don't want to get it to rusting or anything.
Thanks guys.

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It'll feel better when it stops hurting.

 

[Yvsa]

:
I have heard the term, but it's been a lot of years ago.

The term meant annealling the hard steel. It didn't mean hardening in the true sense.
It was generally picked up by people who didn't have much understanding of blacksmithy work.

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>>>>---¥vsa---->®

"I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."

........unknown, to me anyway........

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