Heat Treat 1095 with minimal equipment?

Col Defender

Col Defender

Joined
Nov 11, 2011
Messages
1,398
Normally my knives are 1084 and I heat treat them with a two burner Majestic propane forg, quench in a cylinder of canola oil and temper in a toaster oven. Works well.

Now though, I have a single 1095 blade, ready for heat treating, and I am not sure what to do. I was planning to take it to a class at a much larger facility with all the right equipment, learn to do a ham on and HT there with their equipment. Is there any way I can HT it here with my equipment? How? I know I could send it to Peters but that will be quite costly for just one blade.

Ideas?

Thank you!

Steve
 
If you get a thermocouple for the forge, you should be able to get it to hold 1475f for 10 min, +/- 10f, without making it a pid forge. You can do this upgrade for under $100.00. I could get a weed burner in a 10 brick forge to hold temp for 10 min no problem before I got my kiln.
 
Steve, you can do it in your forge. If you heat treat it exactly like you do your 1084 and it gets hard, it will perform like 1084. But if you can get a soak at temperature, you'll put more of that extra carbon into solution. You can quench in heated canola oil as well. If you would still like to try hamon I can walk you through how I do it.
 
Also, you'll want to normalize that one and do some thermal cycling.
 
From what I understand about 1095 you just need to be able to soak it at 1475 for 10 minutes then quench. I have a PID and thermo couple on my forge just for temp readings at the moment, it doesn't control the gas flow yet. If you have a way to read the temp and see how stable it is you might be good to go. My forge will hold that temp fine for 10 mins using a muffle. I've only done 1084 to date, but I have messed with my forge enough to know I would be able to maintain the soak temperature.
 
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do you have a ball valve on your gas line? You can kinda control things that way. I ended with a 1/2 inch burner, a pottery thermocouple setup and a piece of black iron pipe for a muffle for my Chile forge before I got my oven.
 
kuraki said:
Steve, you can do it in your forge. If you heat treat it exactly like you do your 1084 and it gets hard, it will perform like 1084. But if you can get a soak at temperature, you'll put more of that extra carbon into solution. You can quench in heated canola oil as well. If you would still like to try hamon I can walk you through how I do it.
Click to expand...

Thanks Kuraki for the info and the kind offer. YES!!!! If you're willing, I would love to do a hamon on that 1095 blade under your guidance. We should do it in whatever way works for you. PMs? Texts? However. In the meantime though, what do you use for clay? I should probably get some of whatever you use. And just this morning I watched a FIF episode where they were making swords with hamons and I got confused. When does the clay go on? Before the knife goes in the forge for HT or in between HT and quenching?

Thanks

Steve
 
you can do it with your equipment as mentioned by all above,
another aid to use inside your forge is a pipe muffle or whatever it is called :)

I do all my prototype folder work with 1095 and it works great and it's an excellent user steel IMO


Oh I see jdm already mentioned the muffle :-)
 
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