Burn steel before heat treat?

[MSCantrell]

Just wanted to check before I ruin something- as far as I can glean from the different tutorials and heat-treating threads I've read, it won't hurt anything to burn my 1095 a little while I'm grinding a knife out, will it?

By "burn," I mean "get it hot enough to discolor a little." 1095 doesn't air-harden. (Right?) And I don't care about ruining any hardness. Hell, if it made my unfinished knife a little softer I might be happy. And a little bit of heat in a couple small spots won't be enough to warp anything.

So I can just keep goin' to town with the angle grinder like I have been so far, right?

Thanks guys,
Mike

 

[mete]

That won't be a problem. But after heat treatment be very carefull when grinding or you'll ruin the temper. It's very easy to do this since you have a very thin edge and grinding always produces heat.

 

[Matt Shade]

You'll also want to be sure and normalize the peice as the first step of heat treating. It will erase and work hardening and give you a uniform structure to work with when you harden the blade.

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

Good habits are hard to learn.Bad habits are hard to break.Try to avoid overheating the blade at any point in the work.That way you won't ruin the temper because you get it too hot in the final clean-up.Like Mete said,it won't hurt the untreated blade,but it will ruin the hardened one.
Stacy

 

[MSCantrell]

Normalize before heat treat, huh? Man, the details never stop coming

To do that, I heat to quenching temp and allow to slow cool, right?


Stacy, hadn't thought of it that way, good point.

Mike

 

[Adam DesRosiers]

Mike;
NORMALIZING, OR THERMOCYCLING is bringing the blade up to critical, then letting it cool slowly. Be carefull when you do this not to get hotter than the time before. do this three times before you actually harden the blade, and you will refine grain size and eliminate almost all warpage.
good luck
Adam.