Glass bead before heat treat.

J

jdh6fan

Joined
May 17, 2011
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Working on my first blade. Would it be ok to glass bead an 01 blade before heat treat. I have access to a bead blaster that is really fine. It leaves a very fine satin finish (not course like sand) on stainless knives or firearms. I was going to send the blade out for heat treat and thought that this might make any scale removal easier. Or maybe I should just make another blade and send one out glass beaded and 1 just cleaned up to around 400.
Thanks for your time.
 
That sounds pretty smart to me. If your heat-treater generally returns your blades with just a little oxide that only needs to be polished or buffed off (not heavy scale), I don't see why you shouldn't blast them beforehand. I suspect only a quick light re-blasting will be needed afterwards, or you could hand-sand the oxide off without worrying about bad scratches underneath, and have a head-start on a nice hand-satin finish.

Try it and please let us know. I don't think you have anything to lose and it might save a good deal of time.
 
The finish texture will be heavier if you blast before the steel is hardened. The effect is more subtle afterwards.
There is really no reason you can't do it beforehand, but with a typical home heat treat it would be more or less a wasted effort since you would have some decarb/scale to remove afterwards and would then have to re-blast.
If your heat treater keeps the blade free of decarb/scale then this shouldn't be an issue.
 
Do you have experience with the Bead blaster? Would you be doing it yourself? My only concern would be, to not introduce more stress to the piece.
 
If it comes down to that, I'd rather introduce stress before HT than after. At worst you could ask your HT guy for a basic stress-relief cycle before austenizing.
 
Hey thanks for all the info. I think when I get a few blades ready I'll try blasting one or two of them just to see. Heck no better than I am at this the heat treater might just laugh and send the blades back. I'm learning though, I'll get it figured out. Thanks for yalls time.
 
I once beforeswitching to no powertools polished a blade to mirror before heat treating and removal of scale was easy peasy
 
jdh6fan said:
I think when I get a few blades ready I'll try blasting one or two of them just to see.
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Me too, I have a batch of D2 blades almost ready for HT (I farm 'em out to Peters'), some of which I intended on bead-blasting anyway. I'm all for anything that saves work without sacrificing quality. Thanks for bringing up the idea. :thumbup:
 
Are you folks able to send finish ground blades for heat treating. I was just thinking that generally there's some finish grinding after heat treating that would go well beyond the depth of bead blasting. Just guessing, but if scale usually forms on the surface, you might end up with more scale because bead blasting would increases the surface area. Probably nothing wrong with bead blasting before the heat treat, but it may (?) add time and effort to the process by adding more steps and not eliminating others.

Just wondering, Craig
 
cdent said:
Are you folks able to send finish ground blades for heat treating.
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Yes. Peters' uses vacuum furnaces... no air means no scale. The only thing to remove is the thin oxide color from the heat itself. Even oil-quenched blades come back super clean; you could probably just buff off the heat color.
 
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