is this the basic process of HT?

[hardheart]

heat your entire bit of annealed steel to austenizing temp, get it below the pearlite nose as quickly as possible without creating any special FX, hold above Ms for bainite or get below it to start martensite, which is mostly all you want or need in a knife, temper it cause people do bad things with knives sometimes and/or you missed some of the transformation in the prior steps

From what I've read, the times, temps, and materials used of course will vary on steel and use, but that's what I've boiled it down to. I'm not sure how well this applies to highly alloyed steels, stainless/hss.

 

[mete]

As long as you end up with tempered martensite you'll be ok !