O1 steel, hot enough?

C

Cookswithfire

Joined
Mar 30, 2013
Messages
87
Hey guys,

I just heat treated a O1 steel knife to a almost glowing red in a Map gas soup can forge, when I went to quench in canola oil it did not fair up; did I not heat it hit enough? Should I reheat it and quench again?

Thanks for the help
Can't wait to post pics when I'm done.
 
By the way, I file does seem to skate, but, since this is my first knife, I'm not sure how its supposed to feel when it skates.
Thanks again
 
Canola doesn't always flash.
if you heated it up to the point where it was no longer magnetic, you're probably OK -- no matter what you do, with a soup can forge you're not going to get all the performance possible out of the steel, but it should make you a perfectly serviceable knife.
 
Thanks for the answer. I completely forgot about the magnet test. It is still magnetic, I can just heat
it up again, right?
 
once it's cooled it SHOULD be magnetic.
go ahead and temper it at 400-425 for 2 hours then dunk in a bucket of room temp water until it's cool enough to hold then bake for another 2 hours.
If it holds an edge the way you like, you did OK. If it doesn't, then go back to the forge and reheat it.
 
You should know whether or not it will skate a file before tempering. If it's hard, you can skate that file all day long. If it bites into the edge, it's not hard. And I'm not talking a little bit, I'm talking if it bites enough to take a good bit of metal when pushing the file. The file will make a mark on the carbon, but not the steel itself. File some steel prior to heat treat to get the feel of what a file biting into steel feels like.
 
I'm guessing that "dull red" isn't hot enough. It should be one shade of red hotter than non-magnetic. Non-mag is around 1400F, you want O-1 at about 1475-1500F for HT.
 
I special ordered them to get the temps I wanted - coupled with being in Canada paid at least double what you do in the US



If you're going to use them, keep them stored inside the house.

I had some crumble to dust when I left them in the shop, high humidity, freezing temps etc.
That dust was really hard on toolbox paint and bare steel.
 
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