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Heat Treat Gone Bad (Pics)
- Thread starter brandonm123
- Start date
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2006
- Messages
- 2,506
Wow, that stinks! One of the dangers of a solid fuel forge is how easy it is to burn your steel up. One the other hand, it's also easy to get to welding temperature. 
A couple of ideas to try:
1. Seems like the upright solid fuel forge would be difficult to work with. Try a horizontal forge. Since I'm posting Tim Lively pics, here's his design for a knifemaking forge to be fueled with charcoal.
It's lined in a clay/sand/wood ash adobe mix, and the holes in the tuyere can be blocked off with dollops of wet adobe to cut the forge down to as short of a fire as you want, or use the full length for heat treatment.
2. Use a muffle furnace to heat treat in. Use a piece of UNGALVANIZED pipe large enough to fit your blade. Heat it in the forge to the point that the whole thing is glowing a good orange (you'll probably need to rotate the pipe to get it even), then (with the pipe still in the forge) heat the blade in the pipe. No burning up the blade, it evens out the heat along the blade, and you can put organic material like wood shavings inside to burn up the oxygen and reduce the scale cleanup. This is a trick I learned from Tai Goo.
As another note, you probably have too much air going into the fire. A lot of solid fuel knife forges run nicely off of a hair dryer.
A couple of ideas to try:
1. Seems like the upright solid fuel forge would be difficult to work with. Try a horizontal forge. Since I'm posting Tim Lively pics, here's his design for a knifemaking forge to be fueled with charcoal.
It's lined in a clay/sand/wood ash adobe mix, and the holes in the tuyere can be blocked off with dollops of wet adobe to cut the forge down to as short of a fire as you want, or use the full length for heat treatment.
2. Use a muffle furnace to heat treat in. Use a piece of UNGALVANIZED pipe large enough to fit your blade. Heat it in the forge to the point that the whole thing is glowing a good orange (you'll probably need to rotate the pipe to get it even), then (with the pipe still in the forge) heat the blade in the pipe. No burning up the blade, it evens out the heat along the blade, and you can put organic material like wood shavings inside to burn up the oxygen and reduce the scale cleanup. This is a trick I learned from Tai Goo.
As another note, you probably have too much air going into the fire. A lot of solid fuel knife forges run nicely off of a hair dryer.
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2012
- Messages
- 8
thanks for the tips, i will try that
