Canola oil advantages

Rick Marchand said:
It all depends on what is important to you. I use a $400 Grizzly grinder. I have seen blades that Wally Hayes made on a 1x30 that rival the best of the best. BMK makes a sarcastic but thought provoking comment. He chooses to focus on quenchant but as you say, the tables could be flipped to ask why he uses a $1800 kiln when makers do just fine on a $50 homebuilt forge or just farm out HT all together. His primate friendly shop is "evolving" quickly for various reasons... speed, accuracy, consistancy, independence or just plain fun.

Funny thing is when I read...

... I think of the fact that I invested $100 on a 5gal pail of HQ-K, that is engineered for consistancy and will never lose any of its properties in my lifetime. Canola on the otherhand needs to be changed a couple times a year at least. So at $5/gal for a 5gal tank that is $25 a change out. Even at twice a year you are over $100 in 2 years..... so who is saving a buck in the end and who is walking the aisles at the supermarket more than he has to?
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Well, if I may speak on BMK's behalf, I don't think he had to have his Paragon oven shipped across the continent, since they are based right there in Texas. ;)

That's a very good point on cost vs. value though, Rick.
 
lazlo said:
By the way, as was stated by several posters in the "Hype" thread, canola oil is a medium speed oil, equivalent to Parks AAA or Houghto-Quench G.
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If you haven't yet, you should read the information that Phil Dwyer posted in post #30. It is interesting and I'd never heard some of it before. They mention the apparent incongruity between the quench speed measurement and the actual quenching performance. Apparently it is difficult to compare between the two familys with a "speed" number because you're not measuring apples to apples. It might not be as slow as you think it is. *shrug*
 
Tai Goo said:
If you take good care of your canola, and treat it with some respect, it will last a good while. I’ve heard of some guys that have stretched 5 gallons several years.
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Well, it is obvious those guys aren't peeing in their quench tanks..... maybe that's where we differ.:grumpy::p:thumbup: "Canola Quench P"
 
I've been quenching springs in the same canola oil for 10 years.
 
Rick Marchand said:
Well, it is obvious those guys aren't peeing in their quench tanks..... maybe that's where we differ.:grumpy::p:thumbup: "Canola Quench P"
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Wait a second.... I thought "P#50" was referring to the number of times I had to..... um......

*zips pants back up*
 
Rick Marchand said:
Really, Bill?.... that's pretty damn good. Do you do anything special? Mine got really cloudy a couple times a year.
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You are probably getting your blades way too hot! :(

I've never had any go "cloudy".

I've seen it darken some over time though. I think your average person could easily get 100 blades out of 5 gallons, before there was any noticeable degradation of the canola. I usually pay about $7 a gallon when it's on sale. So, 5 gallons costs about $35. At 100 blades per 5 gallons, that’s 35 cents per blade.

You could save money in the short run by using canola, but in the long run say over the course of 5-10 years, a commercial fluid would most likely save you a few bucks.
 
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I must admit, that I did not have a sealed container for the Canola and it was in my unheated garage workshop during the winter. I would imagine I was getting some moisture contamination as well as huge temperature swings. Well.... it's good to know that canola is more stable than I originally thought.:thumbup:
 
I think cloudy oil is related to moisture and freezing temperatures.

Entirely possible in Ontario, not bloody likely in Arizona.



Edit: dammt rick beat me to it.
 
Rick, I still can't open the PDF, so I'm not sure if it's the same study I have as reference. There have been several as far as I know.

With the responses to the information, it looks like if you like canola you will keep liking it after reviewing the info., and if you like commercial fluids, you will keep liking them. I think we all tend to interpret the "facts" and process the information a bit differently…

I still think this quote sums it up nicely.

“Overall, the cooling properties of the vegetable oils were comparable to each other and it is notable that only convective cooling was obtained with no extended vapor blanket cooling (film-boiling). This cooling profile shows that vegetable oils would not require a cooling rate accelerator and would be acceptable even for difficult to harden, crack-sensitive carbon steels.”

I just take that at face value, and it goes along with what I've experienced.

We aren't trying to hype canola here, just trying to establish that it is an "acceptable" and valid quenching medium for steel, with a few advantages of it's own.
 
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I think what veggy oils lack is control AFTER the initial temperature drop past the nose curve. The cooling rates of engineered oils can be controlled throughout the entire quenching process, right down to Ms.

Essentially, we are seeing the divide between those who delve deeper and become more involved in the metallurgy of heat treat and those who want to make a good knife and not worry about the science of it all. Neither is wrong if they remain honest to their respective methods.

Rick

A few quotes from the other thread...

The difference shows most clearly in the graph of cooling curves. Notice how the commercial oils drop the temperature fast at the high end, and them slow down as the steel enters the martensitic-start region. This is more desirable than the curve depicted by the vegetable oils. The article even says that the vegetable oils may not be as suitable for higher alloy steels ( which is the class that knife blades are made from) than would be desirable.
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It appears to me that the heat extraction of the vegetable oils makes a nice clean curve, where the commercial oils look to have been tweaked to have a slow initial rate (perhaps to keep things even), a high rate at the nose (which dictates if the quench is successful or not), and a low rate going into martensite formation (to reduce warping). Meaning the commercial oils are better optimized for quenching steel. Which is what they have been saying all along - through chemical magic they've deformed the curve of the quench oils to better match the quench requirements of steel.
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Umm, if fastest quench speed was the goal, all the searching and waiting could have been greatly reduced... water and brine beat all quenchants mentioned, hands down. It is when you expand you criteria to multiple other factors that things naturally get more complicated.

I too have seen this study (or one very similar, the text and format seems different), but it fails to alleviate other concerns I have in the consistency of results that I insist on for much of my work. Something that has bothered me concerning this study is the possibility that people could draw conclusions about any petrolium oils other than Micro Temp 157 and Micro Temp 153B, only the most general conclusions can me made about the countless other oils designed for this purpose that were not involved in the test. In quench speed alone there will be a huge discrepency between Parks AAA and Parks #50. How many other liquids could fit between these two oils alone? How many other peterolium based quenchants would fit between them? Based on quench speed alone, AAA is inferior to #50, and both are inferior to water, based on quench speed alone, but is that truly the case?

However this study is fascinating and really shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, there is a load of useful information here about cooling curves and how slight chemical variations, even in natural oils, can have profound effects on properties. Also it is very much worth noting the stability of canola oil in the study while remembering that Houghton has done work with this one vegetable based oil as a quenchant. These studies are invaluable for the little bits of data they provide but even the researchers who do them are often very careful (and wisely so) with their conclusions. The best studies produce more questions than answers.
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Rick Marchand said:
Well, it is obvious those guys aren't peeing in their quench tanks..... maybe that's where we differ.:grumpy::p:thumbup: "Canola Quench P"
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If you pee in the canola oil, it accelerates the cooling enough to use it on high carbon steels. But you have to have a special diet, and you must use a $2,000 Paragon heat treat furnace for it to work :D
 
Rick, I think we are just going to start going around in circles here now. This thread is not about which quenching medium is better or best, or which knifemaking philosophies or approaches are superior O.K.?

I’m sure there are a lot of makers who will agree with you and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, if you are just trying to start another argument about it,… take it somewhere else, please.
 
No, I'm not at all Tai!....... perhaps my wording is off? I did not want to elude that any philosophy is superior to the other.

I am all for using Canola if that is your choice. I have learned many things in this thread about the good traits of this common oil. Some of my previous misconceptions have been cleared up. My concern is that people are getting the wrong impression of engineered oils in the process. BMK represented it best when he made a direct comparisson between the two. They are different. Perhaps the original intent of this thread was not to compare canola to commercial oils but that's how it evolved.
 
It's apples and oranges bud. Let's just leave it at that O.K.?

"We aren't trying to hype canola here, just trying to establish that it is an "acceptable" and valid quenching medium for steel, with a few advantages of it's own."
 
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I want to clear it up again....

Obviously, the makers who are concerned about the minute details of the entire cooling curve are "more involved" in the metallurgy of heat treat and the makers who are concerned about using an oil than gives them their desired performance results, aren't as interested in the intricacies. I fall in the second group. I don't own a rockwell tester or an electron microscope..... I make blades and break them. Attempting to squeeze every bit of performance out of a blade may never translate to the end user but there are a great many things we as knifemakers do that the customer never realizes. I put a bit of faith in the findings from people whose opinions I trust. Can I tell the difference between a 1095 blade that has had a soak, compared to one that hasn't?..... admittedly, no.... but other people who have the equipment can tell and because I trust that info, I bought a digital kiln and engineered quenchant. I know I made awesome knives when I used canola and an open forge because I tested them.... I feel I make even better knives, now.... but I can't prove that within my current testing abilities. So what does it all that mean?........ I have no friggin idea.... what was the question?

Bottom line... I feel a lot better about canola now... and so should many of you.

Rick
 
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Guy's I;m very hesitant to post, but it seems the "my quenchant is better than yours" voices, have been, well...quenched, so here goes, Like most of you I too used Canola in the early years, and was very happy with it, at the time. as I progressed I of course went the "real" quenchant way, but have recently tried something else, and I;d like your opinion on it. I call it "Hillbilly 50" as it's VERY fast, and works great for me and my methods. Recipe is as follows. I have a 2.5 gal quench tank...
1 gal of Kerosene,
3qt of food grade mineral oil
8oz of Blue Dawn dish soap (as a surfactant)
4.4oz bottle of Jet Dry (as a wetter)

I generally use W1, W2, and 1095, occasionally 1084. and I'm getting FABULOUS results from it.
Have any of you tried to make your own before and if so, how'd ya do it?

Jason S. Carter
 
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