Brownell's PBC Non-Scale !!

Greg Covington

Greg Covington

Joined
Oct 28, 1999
Messages
1,563
I saw the online tutorial by Terry Primos on this and since I was ordering from Brownell's anyway, I got a tub of this stuff.

During the heat treat of a 1084 blade, I brought it up to blue color and coated the blade with this PBC, then went slowly up to critical and then edge quenched.

The stuff worked so good that I thought the blade did not harden. Usually I will scale up pretty good on the non hardened area of the blade and with 1084 the scale will pop right off the quenched area. On the coated blade, there was not one pit, etc!

I always grind to about 80% profile before the heat treat and do the final grind after the temper, but ya'll know how you get those pesky areas in the shoulders.

I can wholeheartedly recommend this stuff!!!!

Greg Covington
KnifeMaker/Bladesmith
 
I use the a similar product from MSC (guys with the HUGE catalog - knifemakers best friend) it is called keep-bryte, it is an antiscale compund. Works great, I am sure similar to the prodcut that Brownells sells...just something that I thought I would add.

Ric C. Chopra
Universal Agencies, Inc. (UAI)
www.knifesupplies.com
 
Ugh!
Rob, have you tried oil quenching stainless blades? I've been thinking about trying it. I can't get the blades out of the packs as fast as I'd like to. If I could just cut the end of the pack and drop the blade into the oil I could get em cooled faster. I thought about making a wire rack with a fan under it. Then just cut the end of the pack and drop theblade on the rack. Guess I should do some test blades.
 
Have any of you guys tried borax when forging, I talked to a guy last night and he said if you sprinkle borax on you stock when forging that it will also help keep the scale way down and when heat treating bring your blade up slow and then sprinkle a little borax on it when it starts to show a little red then bring it up to your quenching heat and quench. He claimed it really makes a difference.

Bill
 
Hey Micheal I`m not Rob but I have
tried oil quenching stainless.
It seemed to harden ok. I have
never done any cutting test with
it so I can`t say how well it will
work.
It`s in the shop some were
 
L6,

I just finnished a couple of blades made out of Devin Thomas damascus. I heated them up and soaked, then quenched the whole works in hot oil. worked well! e-mail me if you want specifics.

Bill B????
 
Michael,
The PBC compound is only effective up to about 1600 F.

I have worked with stainless a little bit, and did try oil quenching. I would not suggest dropping the blades from the pouch into the quench however. I don't know, you can take my opinion on that with a grain of salt. I don't have enough experience with air hardening steels to be giving any advice.


Greg,
I take mine down to the final dimensions and to a 400 grit finish like this:

pre-finish.jpg


I have tried going to a 600 grit finish, but it seems to me that I get better adhesion at 400 grit. The blade won't see a grinder after this step. Here's a shot of the blade after hardening and cleaning with boiling water:

after-boil.jpg


You can see that there was no compound on the tang. The compound blocks out the oxygen and alleviates scale. From here the blade goes to the tempering phase as normal.

final-finish.jpg

After tempering, I put on the edge and test the blade. If it passes, I clean up the tang, file in the guard stops and go directly to the final finish. In this case it was 600 grit.

Oh, the reason I can wait until this point to file the guard stop is because I don't harden the ricasso or the tang. They are left at a tough spring temper.


Ric,
I'll have to check out the stuff from MSC. We have an MSC dealer here in Shreveport. Does the Keep-Brite leave the blade as clean as the one I pictured above?

Bill,
I tried the Borax once. It did help, but for me it didn't work quite as well as the PBC compound. I also tried Turco. It worked pretty well, but I did get some pitting.
 
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