How to Heat Treat AEB-L in the Home Shop

A coupon is a small piece of test steel. It is usually 1X2" and absolutely flat on both sides. You mark a corner of each with a reference number and do a series HT tests, using a new coupon each time.. Then you test the hardness of the coupons. This will help you fine tune your HT to the equipment you have..
 
Would a Pre-quench benefit all blade materials?
We are limited ro choice of steel where I live, so I use a lot of Böhler N690 and the occasional M390, RWL34, Damasteel and 5160. Would a pre-quench work for these steel?
 
The way I would answer that, you just have to try yourself. The idea is grain refinement, which improves relative toughness. With low alloy stuff like 5160, this can be accomplished by thermal cycling (or quenching several times...but that can cause other issues). Cycling doesn't work for the high alloy steels, as they get hardened, hence prequench. There are some images that Larrin and maybe others have shown that the prequench does refine grain structure somewhat in the higher alloy steels. There is an image online from a tech manual or Tool Steel book of a chart about D2, and it shows different prequench temperatures and their affect on the "fracture grain size", that it does refine the grain. I think, in that specific case, the chart showed the best prequench temp for D2 to be 1700°F. I think if you have the ability to do so, give it a shot. Do some testing and see if you get an improved toughness. The improvement may not be noticeable in real world use, but it just might be noticeable. "Pre-quenching" is a relatively new topic for myself, and haven't seen it discussed among makers much until recently.
 
Thanks.
I guess the trick would be to find the correct temperature to pre-quench at with out the right equipment to do proper testing.
Will be interesting to see where this topic goes in the future.
 
Hi guys! Thanks so much for all of this great info!
This may be a total newbie question: but I just did my first aeb-l blade following the single oven protocol here, and to my dismay, when I opened the kiln door, the ceramic blocks I’ve been using to hold the blade vertical had shifted and my blade had fallen over and was flat on the bottom of the kiln. Is this HT ruined? Should I try and re-do it or scrap the blade?
 
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