Heat treating damascus?

[YuriM]

This question's been bothering me... How is damascus heat treated? It's a mix of different steels and each naturally has its own hardening and tempering temperatures. Do you select steels with very similar heat-treating properties?

 

[rlinger]

Carbon steel components are usaully selected with similar heat treating requirements. Other non-carbon bearing metals are none consequential to the heat treatment.

RL

 

[Dale Baxter]

Without trying to put 10,000 words on a single page I offer the following.

I have two basic ways to harden Damascus:
The first deals with using two 10xx series steels, one high carbon and one low carbon. I stack the billet and count the total carbon content and divide by the amount of layers to give you an estimated carbon count after (assuming) migration. Example: 4 layers of 1095 and 3 layers of 1008. 4 layers of 1095 would be 380 and 3 layers of 1008 would be 32 to give you 412. Divide the 412 by the amount of layers (7) to give you the estimated carbon content (59).
Then I heat treat the billet as if it were a solid piece of 1059-1060.

The second way is when alloys are used in the billets.
When the billet is made up of two or more different types of steels (alloys, nickel,...ect.), each has it's own way of being hardened (although some are very similar and some do not harden at all), but one type of steel is usually dominate. Heat treating the billet as if it were the dominate steel will usually give you a hard blade. Note* I make all attempts to use similar quench medium steels because an air hardening alloy doesn't do very well quenched in oil.

Did any of this make sense????

Dale Baxter
Dale Baxter Custom Knives

 

[Laredo7mm]

Yup, like Dale and RL said.

I mainly use 1095 and 15N20 (both hardenable) in my damacus. Sometimes I will put in some nickel (not hardenable) or make some cable damacus, but I heat treat all of my stuff like it is just plain old straight 1095.

As quenched it is about 62 HRC and after temper it is 58 to 59 HRC.

I normalize at 1650 °F, 1600 °F, and then 1550 °F. After normalization (grain refinement) I austenize at 1550 °F with an oil quench (about 120 to 130 °F) and temper at 350 °F.

 

[Kevin R. Cashen]

... Do you select steels with very similar heat-treating properties?

Sounds Logical to me