Heat Treating service

JTknives

JTknives

Joined
Jun 11, 2006
Messages
8,651
As some of you know we have been contemplating offering heat treating as a service for a little while. We have decided to move forward with this. The main goal in our mind is to help out the new knife makers that are not able to do a good heat treat on there own. I have been grooming my wife for some time now in the art of heat treating and she actually does heat treating, cryo and tempering of my blades when I'm not able to or I'm at work. So the thought is becaus she Is a stay at home wife she will run the heat treating department.

We are not looking to get rich in this venture just cover cost and make it worth my wife's time. So that being said we are trying out a simple pricing of $1 per inch for simple carbon steels with a minimum of $10. This includes grain refining if needed and heat treating. It will also included 3 hardness tests on the tang. We are still working out the price of cryo and foil wrapped blades but it will be by the inch as well. Shipping cost will be added and you can decide if you want to pay the extra for insurance and for how much.

We are able to heat treat just about any steel here. We have a custom built heat treat oven that is 32" deep. We also have Parks AAA and Parks 50 as well as aluminium quench plates. We also offer liquid nitrogen cryo treatments. If your going high temp stainless or carbon steels we also offer foil wrapping. We are able to provide accurate HRC measurements and will provide you with 3 readings per blade.

I would like to thank shamu for being our first heat treat customer. We received his knives today and plan on shipping them back out to him tomarow. If any of you have any questions or thoughts let us know. Thanks guys

shamu knives
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JT has been awesome throughout this entire process. I will post an update when I finish the knives, but so far his helpfulness and professionalism are worth so much more than what he charged me. Thanks JTKinves...I hope you and your wife take a nice chunk of the HT market :)
 
That's awesome JT. The only part of my knife making I can get my wife interested in is the posibiliy of making some extra cash. "Possibility".
 
Ok I will, I figured I would just see what the guys here thought. I never thought about the services offered thread as I never been there. Thank you
 
Heat treaters are swamped these days.

Be prepared to have a quantity price.

I see hundreds of blades come through Tru Grit constantly.

You might have just started a bit of a nightmare for you.

Enjoy the begging when only a few come it, beware of the time 500 blades come in a time :)

Oh and be sure to have plenty of coils on thermocouples on hand because they will go out at the worse times.
 
Super cool man, it's good to see you going for it, and very advantageous to have your wife trained in the art. Best of luck to you two in this endeavor!
 
I wish the very best in this new Venture of yours and have one suggestion for you & the wife.

Have every customer buy Insurance mandatory! The time that the blades go missing will be the someone that didn't buy it!
You will have someone very unhappy!

Never ship ANYTHING of value without Insurance.
 
Thank you guys for the good wishes.
We are trying it out for now and will see where it takes us.
 
JT...Since you will be doing Stainless HT you might want to look into purging your furnace with "Inert" gas like Argon. The investment is reasonable for a flow meter and regulator along with the gas. The investment out weighs the cost of foil and labor to wrap blades. I made this change a couple years back and I will never go back to foil and it works on simple steels as well.
Just wanted to add that I switched from Argon to Nitrogen gas and didn't see any difference in performance but Nitrogen is much less in price. I purchased my flow meter from Dakota Instruments for about $50.00.

Mike
 
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Busto said:
JT...Since you will be doing Stainless HT you might want to look into purging your furnace with "Inert" gas like Argon. The investment is reasonable for a flow meter and regulator along with the gas. The investment out weighs the cost of foil and labor to wrap blades. I made this change a couple years back and I will never go back to foil and it works on simple steels as well.
Just wanted to add that I switched from Argon to Nitrogen gas and didn't see any difference in performance but Nitrogen is much less in price. I purchased my flow meter from Dakota Instruments for about $50.00.

Mike
Click to expand...

Thank you I had been thinking about that because I don't care for scale on carbon blades. I have never seen any one talk good about shealding gas in the oven. Most say meh it's ok, but no details. What oven do you have? And what do you set your flow rate to?
 
Ok his knife is done and shipping out today. We where shooting for 60-61HRC and landed at 60.5.
A few pictures of the process.

Grain refining, its a process of heating and cooling 3 times while dropping the temp with each step.
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Next up is fresh out of the quench
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The blades had a tiny bow to them out of the quench so we straightened while tempering plus the big bar of 303 stainless helps even out and regulate the knife temp. Don't mind the chicken cup, I felt like having a little eggnog.
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Next the hardness tests. The hardness tester gets checked and calabrate if needed on a test block befor each testing session.
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All done and ready to ship out.
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When I worked for NASA the Met Lab did all the heat treat for the machine shop and my carpool partner ran the Met Lab so I tapped his brain for HT knowledge and they ran all the Stainless parts through with Nitrogen purge in their furnaces. When I got ready to convert I checked out the setup in the lab and it was so simple I can't believe I had not done it sooner.

I have a DIY furnace pid controlled with thermocouple. I ran a 1/8" copper tube through the soft brick on the bottom corner of the furnace and sealed the tube with high temp caulking. The tube extends into the furnace about 1/2" and I put a piece of soft firebrick in front of the tube to help disperse the gas. I flood my furnace with gas before I open the door to put the blades in (rough estimate is like 5 times the volume of the chamber for the flood gas) once I close the door I let it run a minute or two and lower the flow to 10 SCFH (gas is measured in cubic feet per hour) for the remainder of the HT cycle. The volume of Nitrogen gas is so low you don't need a special hood or venting unless you're doing it in a closet.

Mike
 
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