- Joined
- Aug 13, 2009
- Messages
- 102
As mentioned by Erme, Its always good practice to normailze any blades you will be HT'ing, regardless of whether you heated it up and hit it with a hammer or not.
After the rolling and annealing process at the steel mill, there is no guarentee what sort of grain structure you'll be getting. Generally its just roll and anneal at the mill, leaving you with whatever grain resulted from the working and cooling processes. This could be a cause (or at least contribution) of your larger grain. But overheating will most certainly also do it.
I forge all of my blades and have always normalized, so I can't speak from personal experience regarding what happens if you just harden steel straight from the mill without normalizing. However, I have seen a few stock removal makers who started running normalization cycles get better grain results than when they were just hardening the standard stock.
After the rolling and annealing process at the steel mill, there is no guarentee what sort of grain structure you'll be getting. Generally its just roll and anneal at the mill, leaving you with whatever grain resulted from the working and cooling processes. This could be a cause (or at least contribution) of your larger grain. But overheating will most certainly also do it.
I forge all of my blades and have always normalized, so I can't speak from personal experience regarding what happens if you just harden steel straight from the mill without normalizing. However, I have seen a few stock removal makers who started running normalization cycles get better grain results than when they were just hardening the standard stock.
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