How to remove color after heat treat

J

JeffDentonBlades

Joined
Mar 9, 2014
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My first post. Gained a lot of knowledge and for that I am thankful for all that contribute. I have a question. Use mostly CPM154 and CPM S35VN. I do start to finish on my own including heat treat in which I use stainless steel foil to wrap the blades. Before I heat treat, blades are about 90% complete. Following heat treat, I finish up the grinds (which are usually sabre) but my problem is removing the coloration from heat treat on the non grind part of the blade. I currently use a magnetic holder with the knife against the platen with a 220 grid belt--somewhat effective but one flinch and a lot of work is down the drain plus loads up belts FAST. I have tried 220 paper by hand but very time consuming. I am thinking that much more learned than I must have a better method the get the non grind part of the blade ready for final finish. Thank you in advance!!!
Jeff Denton
www.facebook.com/jeffdentonknives
 
SS foil is great. Place a postage size piece of brown paper grocery sack in the the pack and double fold the SS,this will reduce the amount of coloration.
 
The heat treat colors should come off somewhat easily, are you heat treating in foil or an inert environment?

Try vinegar, sometimes it will take off the color effortlessly. If you need to grind it for a while to remove something isn't right, even a quick touch to the buffer should remove the color.
 
Ive found that if I coat my blades in ATP-641 and then also wrap them in a single layer of stainless tool wrap I get a finish that cleans up very quickly after heat-treat. I can take blades to 600 grit before heat-treat and then clean them up to exactly how they looked with just a few minutes of hand sanding.

Not sure if that's helpful, but I've found that method saves me a lot of time. When I was using just tool wrap there would be an occasional blade that would get 'etched' (probably really light decarb) during the HT process that would then require a bunch more finishing afterwards. It's really nice to be able to do 95% of my finishing before heat-treat.
 
Welcome Jeff. Fill out your profile so we know where you are and a bit about you.

There are many ways to remove the color stains. Sanding is done on all surfaces on my knives, so the colors are removed. If you have surfaces that don't get sanded, try placing the blades in a muriatic acid (HCl) bath for a short while after HT. Rinse and neutralize well, and follow all safety procedures with handling and storing the acid. Do it outside unless you like rusted shop machinery.
 
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