- Joined
- Nov 28, 1999
- Messages
- 14,985
Went to Kansas City last weekend and spent a day and a half in the shop with ABS Mastersmith Russ Andrews, heat treating a bunch of my blades and generally soaking up any knowledge he was willing to share(which is just about anything you might wanna know). Thanks again, Russ.
I swear, everytime I do any heat treating, I learn stuff that you would think would be common sense to most folks. Here's an example. I was trying to get cool hamons on all these blades, except the two little damascus blades. I had furnace cement applied and let it dry. Doahhh! Forgot that all these carbon steel blades(1095,1084, W2) still had to be put through the 3 normalizing cycles. Well, somewhere before they got the final quench into the Park's 50, all the heat blocking furnace cement fell off. So, all of these blades, except for the second biggest one, will probably not have cool hamons. Unless, it just happened to occur naturally. What they will be, however, is pretty damn good blades. Pretty sure I got full hardness out of all of them, and all got 3 tempers at 400 degrees of 2 hours each time. Should be plenty hard and tough. Umm, yeah; one of them had the tip snapped off, in an attempt to correct some warpage. Guess it'll end up a sheepsfoot instead.
The second biggest one, I remembered to do the normalizing cycles before applying the furnace cement, so the furnace cement stayed on through the quench. After just a quick pass on the grinder, I can see a Hamon(how cool it will be, remains to be seen).
The two damascus blades, I've already started finish grinding on.
I swear, everytime I do any heat treating, I learn stuff that you would think would be common sense to most folks. Here's an example. I was trying to get cool hamons on all these blades, except the two little damascus blades. I had furnace cement applied and let it dry. Doahhh! Forgot that all these carbon steel blades(1095,1084, W2) still had to be put through the 3 normalizing cycles. Well, somewhere before they got the final quench into the Park's 50, all the heat blocking furnace cement fell off. So, all of these blades, except for the second biggest one, will probably not have cool hamons. Unless, it just happened to occur naturally. What they will be, however, is pretty damn good blades. Pretty sure I got full hardness out of all of them, and all got 3 tempers at 400 degrees of 2 hours each time. Should be plenty hard and tough. Umm, yeah; one of them had the tip snapped off, in an attempt to correct some warpage. Guess it'll end up a sheepsfoot instead.
The second biggest one, I remembered to do the normalizing cycles before applying the furnace cement, so the furnace cement stayed on through the quench. After just a quick pass on the grinder, I can see a Hamon(how cool it will be, remains to be seen).
The two damascus blades, I've already started finish grinding on.
