Hardness Testing

watercrawl

watercrawl

Joined
Jun 2, 2006
Messages
422
Do most/all knife makers have the means to hardness test every blade they heat treat in house?

I'm trying to convince myself to get a heat treat oven, but having to get a $1,000 tester on top of the costs for the oven is making me second guess the decision. With using Peter's, you get verification of hardness for every blade which is something I want.
 
Get a small portable Ames hardness tester. Look on Ebay. Right now they are all about $1000, but, I was patient and found mine for about $200
 
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you can get some Flexbar hardness files . They at least let you know you are in the ball park of what you are shooting for .
 
If you don't have a hardness tester or have anyone nearby who can test them for you (machine shops will sometimes do this for you if they have a tester) then you have to be prepared to do quite a bit of cutting tests, brass rod tests, etc. to confirm your results. Having some control blades of known hardness is obviously helpful here. Some alloys are more predictable than others, I have some I will do myself and others that it makes more sense to send out.
 
I agree with ONeill. The flexbar files will tell you close enough what you have. If you can find or buy a couple of test plates with a definate Rc reading, you can get a feel for degrees of resistance in the cut and get pretty close with these files on a blade. These files can be purchased separately without having to buy the whole set, but the full set is nice to have on hand.
 
evey now and then i have the tool and die shop check a few blades and when ni am working up a new HT for a new steel i ask nicly a maker that i know has a great tester set up for the best accuracy the tool and die shop is good but i dont think they do piles of testing (had also to learn not to give them a target hardness as i think they fudged me a point here and there back in the day )
 
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