Heat Treaters?

B

benha

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Mar 13, 2013
Messages
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Not sure if this is the right forum. If not, please forgive me.

I'm working on a spear gun point project - kinda knife like - for which I need to heat treat three pieces of 17-4 PH stainless. Each is a round rod about 12" long and 0.1875 in diameter. The local heat treat guy wanted ... cough ... $85.00 to do this.

This is a one-time thing for me. Anyone out there have a recommendation for someone that I could send these to that can take them to something close to H900 for me for considerably less money? I was kinda hoping to find someone willing to just throw them in an oven with a "real" job for me and charge me $20 for the trouble.

They'd be really easy to stuff in a padded envelope and send to where ever...

Thanks!
-Ben
 
Don't really know if he'll do it or not but why not shoot Darrin Sanders a PM? He's a real great guy to work with and does an awesome job.
 
benha said:
Not sure if this is the right forum. If not, please forgive me.

I'm working on a spear gun point project - kinda knife like - for which I need to heat treat three pieces of 17-4 PH stainless. Each is a round rod about 12" long and 0.1875 in diameter. The local heat treat guy wanted ... cough ... $85.00 to do this.

This is a one-time thing for me. Anyone out there have a recommendation for someone that I could send these to that can take them to something close to H900 for me for considerably less money? I was kinda hoping to find someone willing to just throw them in an oven with a "real" job for me and charge me $20 for the trouble.

They'd be really easy to stuff in a padded envelope and send to where ever...

Thanks!
-Ben
Click to expand...

We have no clue as to where you are, not even a clue about what country you are in, let alone anything more specific.


If you put knives in a padded envelope, expect them to be lost.

If you ship knives, blanks, whatever anywhere - package them safely and securely with multiple layers of packaging and padding.
Anything less than overkill means you will lose your goods.


After all, what kind of spear gun tip wouldn't go though an envelope?

If you read the feedback area of the exchange forum, you will see that it's happened before
 
17- 4ph heat treats at a feally low temp, like under 500 degrees if I remember. At that tempbyou could do it yourself in your oven. The good tbing about the low heat treat is low likelihood of warpage.
 
Thanks, folks.

I'll ping Darrin and see if he can help. Much appreciated.

And... For the record. It's currently in Condition A, and I'm in San Francisco, CA.

Thanks!
-Ben
 
Farid told me 800F (425C) for an hour. The problem is, even though it's low temp. comparatively, it's still too hot to do without specialist equipment.
It is the sort of temperature range used by "decorate your own" pottery studios to fire their clays, as often the pottery is pre fired and all they're doing is fusing the paints.
 
If it is condition A, just make the part, heat the kiln to 900F and soak in there for 1 hour, you'll get around 44RC. Hope this helps.
 
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Your 17-4PH Stainless doesn't heat treat like your regular martensitic steels. You buy this in the annealed condition and then you Age harden it to H900 ( for max hardness of 40 to 48 R/C ) which means 900 deg. for one hour. Age them in a self cleaning oven on the cleaning cycle and they should come out a pretty blue color, they should be fine. If your concerned about the hardness then find someone to test one, if they try to charge you then that would be a crime. But believe me a Blue color means they're ok.
 
If I were you, I'd take your rods, cut some PVC pipe to about 1/2 in (total) longer than the rods, so that they can't move much back and forth, and then mail them that way. (Obviously, you would have to use glue and screw ends to seal it shut. It's the back and forth movement that destroys packaging when shipping heavy, dense, long things like this.

You will get someone killed shipping something like that unless you do it right. I have worked at UPS in the distribution centers, and if you just put it in an envelope they will get put into overgoods when your packaging falls apart on one of the miles of belt in each center.

By the time you get through paying to ship this back and forth and paying the guy $20 for his trouble like you say.....you are going to be awfully close to that $85 price tag that your treater wanted.....and he's local.
 
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