just heating the knife, I would pass it slowly back and forth to get an even heat. The tip is going to heat faster. Make the tip thicker than you want and then thin it down in the finish grind or heat the main body first.
Tongs, those long handled needle nose pliers from Harbor freight work well.
vise grips are another good thing to have .
A slideing firebrick on the back should help control the ventilation of the forge.
You might want to pass the tip out the backside to keep it cool, while heating the main portion of the blade.
my .02
Here's an article BY Randall Graham I based my procedure on
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Here is an excellent article writtten by Randall Graham, if I had his knowledge and eloquence, I would say it the same way.
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Author: Randal October 16, 2000 at 05:22:20
I've talked about normallizing, annealing, and heat-treating in general out of a gas forge...thought I should clarify some things.
First, my favorite fuel is Charcoal...but to be honest, my belief is that it's romantic, smells nice, and fun, but quite inconvienient at times, so generally I'm using a propane fired gas forge for most forging and heat-treating. I have a larger propane forge for general smithing and welding big billets, or breaking down large steel stock.
This main forge of mine is very small. It's a 7 inch diameter pipe with 1/4 inch wall, and it's 10 inches long. The ends are capped with 1/4 inch plate, and in the ends, centered, are small triangular doors, with rounded bottoms on the openings...this helps to center blades and stuff in the forge while working. So, with the lining (one inch kaowool) , the chamber is 5 inch dia by 8 inches long.
Yes, it's REALLY small.
In forging work, it'll quickly heat up a 5-6 inch section. That's all I need to deal with at one time, especially doing swords. Heating more than that at a time is more trouble than it's worth, and a waste of gas. I can normallize and heat-treat blades up to around 40 inches in this forge with no trouble, using the pass-back-and-forth method. Great exercise for the shoulders.
It's fired by a simple single venturi burner mounted off-angle from the center, so the fire swirls around the lining and promotes even heat. I know a few have said this isn't nessecary...but it is, after building litterally dozens of forges, I can tell you that it gives you more heat, more efficiency, and cleaner/more even burns.
The forge is mounted horizontally, by the way.
This forge runs about 8-10 hours for me off 20# of gas, it's the best I've had so far in gas consumption, and it is capable of 2800-3000F temps if needed, but it's rare.
I ONLY forge and heat-treat with this unit, I NEVER put flux in it, or use it for any welding or soldering. It's my main forge and I want to keep it in good condition, especially for heat-treating. I have another larger forge for the dirty-stuff, like welding. It costs something like 30 or 40 bucks to build, but it's handy to have both torches and some kind of welding ability. Burner is a pipe-fitting burner, like Ron Reil's.
Now, what I find, is that when we want more heat, the "thag muscle", the big one that connects the male's mind directly to his dick through the center of the body, influences us to believe that bigger is obviously the answer. It's not nessecarily true though, as many things the thag muscle would want us to believe.
My small forge gives me enourmous "fire-power" through virtue of it's small chamber, which very intensly focuses and captures the fire and it's potential for making heat. With a needle valve positioned so adjustments can be made quickly and intuitively, it also allows for a huge amount of immediate control. When I'm heat-treating a sword, I can also watch the blade out the backside of the forge, as well as the front, and have a very good on-the-fly view of exactly where my heat is going and what areas need to be addressed. It doesn't take very long before this whole back-and-forth method gets quite intuitive and natural, it gets easier every time it seems. Still, it requires a fair amount of time and practice to get real good at it. My time is cheap to me, what the hell.
And we have an innate tendancy to get into a rush, which is a bad thing with an open atmosphere forge and heat-treating procedures...you WILL overheat something, and/or make a hot/cold spot. Trust me, you will. What I find I need to do is relax and take it slow, and move things up in temp in steps, keeping it all under my control. Don't allow the fire to dictate what's going to happen, keep control. I creep up to critical non-,ag temps slowly and deliberately, and hold the blades there as well for a time, paying attention not to be any hotter than nessecary. Cool thing is if you take it easy and come up resonably slow, the blades will appear to go non-mag at a lower temp...to an extent this is technically true, but as well it's just allowing things to stay caught-up during the process. When you heat fast and hard, surface temps blaze into the upper oranges but the core stays cooler, enough to fool both you and the magnet. so by the time you quench, you're hotter than you need to be by quite a margin, and this all adds up to extra stress and increased chances of failure in the quench... coarse grain, cracking, warping, uneven curvatures, all that crappy stuff we gotta fight with.
Remember not just to consider the outside of the steel, remember the inside as well, it's like cooking kinda. You don't want the inside un-cooked.
This all applies to salt-bath stuff and any heat-treating equiptment really, as well. Just relax and take it easy, you can't make steel do anything...you can only ask it. Steel is a "she", no matter what anyone else sez...so treat her as such and be nice. When you get demanding, she gets bitchy.
Now, the basics really are very basic. But keep in mind that within these basics is room for an enourmous amount of playing around, and thats a good thing, thats where you discover stuff. But first, getting a basic repeatable and reliable routine established is all-important, it becomes a forever base-line for you to stray from, and come back too, as it's needed. My basics are...
1) I can break-down and rough form blanks and big stock at high temps, so heats last longer and I can move maximum amounts of steel in a given time...but I have to realize and understand that this will have to be addressed later during forging and heat-treating, I have to know that I am in fact causing grain growth and a lot of stresses doing it this way.
2) I can start thermal cyling and treating right at the pont where I start forging, and I have to to get best results. I don't like getting things much over high orange...1600-1700f during heavy shaping, and I don't like letting it get to cold either, dull red means back to the fire.
3) When I get down to shaping fine surfaces and cleaning up lines and bevels, just heating to critical is where I want to go, and I lightly work the steel as it passes down to low reds and almost black...this way this fine-forging process also can add the elements of normallization to the process, and it starts everything off nicely for the dedicated thermal cycling that comes afterwards.
4) After forging a piece to stisfaction, it MUST be completely and thouroughly normallized...I accomplish this by carefully heating the entire blade, regardless of size, evenly to the non-magnetic temp and allowing it to cool in still air, to black...under 900F And I repeat this process for three complete cycles.
5) I have a high opinion of spherodized annealing...although do it in a very low-tech kinda way...it works regardless. I take the blade back up to reds, 1200-1300F, and do not allow any part of the blade to go non-mag or reach critical temps. I hold it here for around 30-40 minutes if it's a sword blade, maybe less if it's knife-sized, and deliberately cool it slowly, eventually allowing it to reach room temp. This will accomplish some very interesting things, most important are the softness of the steel, making it easy to shape and work, and how it will increase the results of the subsequent hardening and drawing cycles.
6) At this point I will do as much of the shaping and forming work as I possibly can, filing, scraping, carving, grinding...now is the time to do all of the heavy removal work, and to make sure all the lines are where they are supposed to be, and straight and crisp. It saves a crapload of work later on. It also ensures best results during hardening. IF no clay or differential hardening is in store for the given blade, iI may finish it to a high level here, perhaps 400-600 grit, to again save labour later when the blade is hard. If I am clay-treating, I drawfile everything smooth, or go no finer than 120 grit, to ensure clay adheres during the process. you CANNOT have a sharp or sharp-cornered edge when you harden, it'll likley crack. I go through great pains to make sure the edge is smooth and round. I also make all scratch-patterns ALONG the blade, instead of across...this will help prevent cracks.
7) I'm ready to harden... I'll sometimes pre-heat the tang/shoulder area on a big blade just a little bit before I start passing the blade through the forge and bringing it all up to temp...this can help this problem area on the really long stuff. I do it by simply running the blade all the way through till my bar and the blades tang are in the fire themselves, with an idle going in the forge...I just let some reds just BARELY start showing on the tang, then I start. I bring it up as even as I can, I'll adress cold/hot spots as they occur by stopping in the fire for a second, or moving faster past a hot spot...whatever feels good, untill I get to a nice, even upper red, just below non-mag. At this point I'll add a little more fire untill I start to get that orange glow along the edge, then back off a bit untill It seems this is all the temp I'll get on the edge...usually you can simply keep going and wait for the rest of the blade to catch up, sometimes a little extra tweak of gas will be required... the aim is to get critical temp even throughout the entire blade, and to hold it there for a bit, a couple of minutes is good, without going any hotter than nessecary.
8) then I quench. I have a nunber of methods for the quench, but the two basics are oil and water. In both cases it will help to pre-heat the quench...100-120F in both cases...it'll reduce the shock and increase the success, although room-temp water and oil can be used succesfully if you got a particularly well-developed thag muscle. After all the rolling and boiling has stopped in the quench, then IMMEDIATELY go to the draw, or tempering cycle. Waste no time.
9) I draw three times, more if some straightening is required, at temps rangeing from 300-600 and for usually half-hour cycles.
10) I have a scotch.
That is just the basics, and it's my own base-line. I do at times vary some of it in order to explore ideas or look for specific results, but it's all based on this set of steps and usually does'nt stray to far.
It's also where I think we should all start...BEFORE fancy gear or big words, it'll allow you to get to a point where mettalurgical explanations and concepts will make sense, because you will already have seen and expierienced them. It makes the salt-baths and big words work a whole lot better if you can do it the "hard way" and no what it is you should be looking for during the processes.
One last thing, if you are going to forge and heat-treat yourself, you really may benifit by choosing a very small selection of steels and sticking with them, at least for a few years, before you try and use a whole bunch of different stuff.
I highly reccomend 1050 for tools and such. I also reccomend it for a starter steel when clay-hardeneing Japanese-style stuff is concerened.
5160 is a good basic big-knife and sword steel.
1084 and 1095 are great all-around blade steels, and also, my favorite all-around steel these days is Howard Clark's 1086M. If I could only have one, it would be the 1086M.
And L-6 can be a good one to explore, however, it's problematic sometimes, so best start with the simple ones first.
Hope this didn't bore anyone... it helps me to go over the basics sometimes too, why not here I figure...
I was going to use that black, thin walled furnace pipe stuff, but I went cheap (and will save time on hacksawing), bu using an empty paint can (never had paint in it). Should work just fine, and it's pretty short, which will be nice for my size of knives. I will take pics while putting it together and so we'll have another tutorial on making small forge (if it turns out!)
