Forged or Not?

Cobalt

Cobalt

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Joined
Dec 23, 1998
Messages
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Hi all,

Was wondering about forging versus stock removal with todays top steels. My question then is, has anyone had a chance to compare a steel forged versus heat treated by the best around such as paul bros. Was wondering in steels like 5160 and 52100 if there is a noticeable difference in high quality heat treat versus forging the steel.

This is all barring high tech steels unless you want to compare cpm3V forged to non forged if that's been done. I was wondering about apples to apples. So O-1 forged to O-1 treated, 1095, 5160, 52100, etc...


Using the best of both worlds is the difference that noticeable?
 
I have used knives of O-1 that were made by both methods. They problem is that they were not the same knife. As far as I am concerned there is no way to compare these knives because they had different edge geometries, blade shapes, thicknesses and grinds. There are just too many variables to say that the differences noted were because of the way they were made.

One thing I will say though, whether using stock removal or forging, O-1 is a damn fine knife steel.
 
This is a very touchy subject. Some people claim that forging will improve the steel by aligning or refining grain. Others argue that unless you forge down from a very large billet, you don't get any measurable improvement. All would agree that there are many, many more opportunities to screw up a steel when forging than when doing stock removal if you don't know what your doing. Finally, people might mean different things by "heat treatment". If a stock remover doesn't normalize the steel, which can take quite a few cycles for 5160 and 52100, and just use the steel as is, there are chances that the grain of the steel "as delivered" wasn't as refined as it can get. You also should normalize after grinding and before hardening.
 
I work O1, but do at least three normalizing cycles(or one full normalize and two "flash normalize" as Ed Fowler describes them) in any heat treating now. I've already noticed that the knives hold up bettre, least to the little bit of testing I've done.
 
I have tested 1084 forged and stock removal, and done a little with 52100 on the same subject. One thing to consider with buying bars and doing stock removal is the concern of grain refinement. In a foundry, they are under the gun to get batches of steel done and ready for shipping. They do the minimum required to get the steel to a useable state and then get it to the distributor. The steels are sometimes shipped in plate form and sheared into bar stock. Other times it is cold rolled or hot rolled depending on the composition. This is a forging process in itself, but as you could imagine it would not be as well controled temperature wise as would be done by a good smith on a knife sized billet. On sheared bars, the grain could be running across the bar in stead of along it's length. Forging will dramaticly improve the grain alighnment on said bars.

My primary concern after any forging or exposure to higher temperatures is grain refinement. I do this with normalizing and annealing. How do you know if the foundry did a good job annealing the steel you bought? It could have very poor grain structure. A normalizing cycle or two and a couple of anneals can't hurt. The preparation for heat treating (hardening) is like laying a foundation for your house. You can build a great house on a poor foundation,...and have a poor house.

So, I have found from the tests I did that a properly prepared stock removal blade and a similar forged blade held an edge the same and cut the same. The forged blade did have more flexability and was just a little tougher. The test blades were 4" long, so the differences were very slight. The blade I made that I did not anneal but was made by stock removal was not nearly as good as the other two.

I taught the first week of the Intro to Bladesmithign course week before last at the ABS school. We had an overheated peice of 5160 a student had cut off from his bar. One of the students father ( he was a Journeyman smith) heat treated the peice and broke it. Then normalized the larger peice twice and heat treated it, broke it again, then annealed it, heat treated it and broke it again. The reduction in grain size was very dramatic. It went from a texture like fools gold from being over heated, to a very fine and flat gray after the annealing. It was an eye opener for sure.
 
I definitely agree with Bailey on everything about the steel and grain size. When you stock remove a piece of steel, hopefully it was prepared for heat treating by having gone through the cycles that promote the finest grain structure possible for that particular steel. If not, it would pay to invest in some heat and a bucket of vermiculite to make sure.
Even if the steel has the same mill specs, the way it was produced will have an effect on the final properties of the knife when completed. As far as I know, this will probably only apply to carbon steel knives. That is why I always normalize twice and anneal the steel that I roll out when finished with the rolling. Also keeps me from guessing about it later :).
 
I first need to say that I forge 'cos I like it and I am nowhere near able to impart the properties that REAL bladesmithing does to the carbon tool steels. This is due to my very amateurish techniques. For most newbies and non-hardcore smiths, I feel that concentrating on the heat treat as a means of improving performance with a given steel, is a viable alternative. Depends on where you set your standards ;) . Hee hee, I may be stepping in it now...

I like using O-1 steel for stock removal because the stock I get is extremely even and fine grained as it comes, and as long as I don't destroy the thing in heat treatment, it produces a blade that satisfies my standards in terms of performance and finish. The stuff I use is precision ground or flat ground Sheffield (England) stock. It is expensive but it is good - far better than many other examples of O-1 I've obtained from other manufacturers. It also contains BOTH Vanadium and Tungsten, a couple of other suppliers only listed having one or the other in their version of O-1.

This is as opposed to my 1084, where my edge packing and forming methods, as crude as they are, already noticably produce improvements in grain size and performance at the edge. Again, I stress that this is followed closely by careful attention to heat treatment.

A newbie "smith's" perspective. Jason.
 
I forge because I enjoy it and prefer it for that reason alone. Its more difficult and takes more time, but worth the sweat and still an exceedingly efficient way of doing things. Though, I can match the performance doing stock removal any day of the week.
 
Originally posted by Jason Arnold
I forge because I enjoy it and prefer it for that reason alone. Its more difficult and takes more time, but worth the sweat and still an exceedingly efficient way of doing things. Though, I can match the performance doing stock removal any day of the week.
Click to expand...

So forging for you is more efficient than stock removal?

And you can match performance by either method?
 
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