Heat Treating - thoughts?

doesn't alot of it come down to personal preferences too....ray...you said you like to use primarily 52100...let's just say that maker "x" uses L6.....and you both make a knife....each one of you have different methods for heat treating the steels you are familiar with......i don't think every maker is responsible for taking multiple steels through various heat treatments and testing every one......if i wanted to buy a knife from ray and i liked 52100 as a performance steel i would buy it from him.....knowing he is familiar with thte steel and i'm sure tests it......i wouldn't go out of my way to convince him to use L6 or any other steel.....i think larrin has a point with this......i think it would be great if knifemakers tested tons of diffeent steels with various ht's and tested each one.....but i think alot of makers when they start out probably try different steels and talk to different makers and do experiment with their ht's......how else would they learn anything......i think if a maker likes 52100 and gets a good ht from it and tests it and it works out great....then that's pretty much it.....if you have a specific use for your knife then that should be discussed with the particular maker.....and i would think that the maker would make and heat treat the knife accordingly to your use......i am not a knifemaker so i apoligize if i got anything wrong.....ryan
 
Ray,
I think you hit on the very essence of the argument..."You don't have to reinvent the wheel everyday." This is exactly right. A large number of makers collaborate on what they find to be the best method of treating different steels and share their results-- Specifically so that not every maker has to do this. Same goes for edge geometry, finishing, and just about every aspect of knifemaking. So, no one person does all of these tests for all steels in all applications. HOWEVER, the knifemaking community as a whole has done/is doing these tests for a large number of steels. And because they share information, everyone has the benefit of learning how to HT properly for just about any given steel and any given application.
It surely is a special group of people that will share information this freely-especially with competitors.

Nick
 
Ryan, your right about the steels and finding a maker that uses what you want. The L6 brought back an incident that happened several years ago when I sent 4 identical knives with identical heat treats to Cliff Stamp to be tested without him knowing which knife was made from which steel. The L6 failed horribly to my surprise. That was until I remembered that all steels don't heat treat the same. I tried so hard to make them all identical, that I didn't do the L6 justice.
Anyway, time to enjoy myself in the shop for a while.
Ray
 
have enough fun with all the family for all of us like me stuck at work ray.....ryan
 
Maybe it's just a question of how appropriate it is to use heuristics in HT. Once you get a recipe that produces a knife that does what you ask of it, do you need to polish, etch, and view the steel under a microscope? Are you getting less fracturing from tempered martensite, pearlite, bainite, retained austenite...? I read some posts and the talk of solution, segregation, dislocation, habits, planes, boundaries, etc. is more detailed than I can fully follow.

More clearly defining 'knifemaker' might help here, too. There are lots of guys who don't have websites, don't go to shows, maybe only sell to acquaintances, or only local sportsmen, maybe only gift the blades. There's a ton of posts just on BF where fellows mention how they get the steel to non-magnetic in the forge, then dip it in some old oil. Are they counted in the percentage/discussion? Old, simple methods probably don't work so well for relatively new, complex steels.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top