heat treat for 01

swede2207

swede2207

Joined
Mar 10, 2002
Messages
323
Before anyone says to do a search ..i did and it wouldnt come up..is it easy to do? Is there a basic formula to follow? I dont have much more to do after heat treatment so any advice will be appreciated.
 
Here's my setup. First off, have to make some Goddard's Goop. Goddard doesn't really give an exact recipe in $50 knife shop, so I use that supplied byuser XRAYED here.

40% parrafin/wax (I use mainly old candles)
40% Shortening (generic Crisco)
20% Automatic Transmission Fluid (From dollar store)

Melt it all together, make sure it's well mixed, then throw it in a cake pan or similar and let cool until solid again. Make sure pan has a lid so you can snuff it if you ignite the stuff.

Preheat tempering oven(I use one in my kitchen) to tempering heat you're going to use.

Start out with a scrap piece of metal, get it hot, use this to preehat the goop. Then time for the O1.

Use your torch, barbecue grill, whatever, and bring it up until ti's nonmagnetic(I use old hard drive magnets to test this, have one attached to the quench pan). once it tests as nonmagnetic, put it back in fire to get it back up to heat(time to test it will have let it cool off), bring it to heat(pay attention to colors as you go so you can get this easier) and let it soak for 5 seconds, careful not to overheat the tip. Then quench just the edge, making sure you move blade back and forth, not side to side.

Once it's cooled down to about 145F or so(nonmagnetic will be in the 1400F-1600F range if memory serves), get it quickly in oven for the first temper.

A lot of that I sorta jsut fake from experience, but you'll get the hang of it pretty quick. O1 is easy to heat treat at home, good steel to start with.
 
So in actuality , all im quenching is the edge? It is a full tang knife..what about the handle? should i just leave it? Thanks im off to compile my goop!
 
I only qunech the edge, which leaves the spine and tang soft and gives a more durable knife, in my opinion. It also makes it easier to go back and drill holes in tang if you forgot, or if you change the design somewhat. not that I've ever made that mistake. ;)
 
etp777, I've never heard of your mixture before...what advantage does it give you over just regular oil?
 
Wayne Goddard puts it forward in his book. An old Blacksmith taught him to use bacon grease for quenching, claiming it got the toosl harder than any other quenchants. Goddard then did some research on heat treating, and in an old book that had a list of quench speeds, tallow(animal fat) was on top of list for fastest quench.

SO then he started experimenting. He started with just bacon grease/fat froj kitchen, and while it worked great, tended to get rancid over time, and neighborhood animals were getting in it. SO then he picked up box of old junk candles at garage sale, in theory that it'd keep longer if it was harder, this panned out. Later added hydraulic fluid, which seemed to improve the quench.

ALl this information courtesy of Wayne Goddard's $50 Knife Shop. DIdn't quote word for word, as it's almost a page of text, but that gives you rough idea. he uses this for everything except double edge blades, which require a straight quench into oil.

Has worked well for me so far, though admittedly I've used it a lot less than he has.
 
Originally posted by Bruz
etp777, I've never heard of your mixture before...what advantage does it give you over just regular oil?
Click to expand...

The great advantage to me is that the mixture solidifies between uses and there is less chance of me kicking it over and spilling oil all over my shop (been there done that).

Since my original mix of 40% parafin, 40% lard, and 20% ATF....I have added some bacon grease to see if it improved the smell :D This quench has done very well for me and I have no reason to use anything else.

Before each use, I heat a bar of scrap steel and quench it in the mixture to melt it and preheat it to 140-160F. Then it is ready for the blade.

With O1, I quench the edge, then let the color disappear from the spine, let the blade cool to around 150F and the temper three 1 hr cycles at about 410F.

Greg Covington
 
See, we do same thing, but he described it all better, as generally happens. :)

ANd yeah, i like that I can throw pan around and no trobles, worst case, i manage to crack the stuff, then I just heat it all up enough to flow again and let it coola nd solidfy in a solid chunk.

I use a scrap of 440C to preheat mine, but the steel itself doesn't matter, just that it's something that I can heat up and stick in there. If you're doing several blades, use the preheated chunk(mine's only about 3-4" long, so move it around a little), then start with shortest blade and move up, this will progrsessively make sure a big enough section is preheated for the next bigger blade as you go up.
 
Any oil will work just fine. Air in not fast enough for O1. Faster quenching agents (water etc.) will increase the chance of cracking/warping.
 
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