Post HT warp correction

[creekdawg]

Hello all I'm nearing the home stretch of completing my first knife thanks in large part to this community.

I have heat treated my 1084 in a two brick propane forge and tempered twice and of course sanded for quite a while. Starting to get excited and beginning to think I may pull this off.

Then I notice the tang near the butt has a slight warp. Sorry I do not have a pic but it's enough to notice. It's not flat. Last night I heated back up to around 500 d and put in vice. No dice. I now realize I probably need to overbend to correct this.

My question in this rambling is can you temper or heat up multiple times without adverse effects? Should I just use the torch and heat the tang and vise it up with rebar?

Obviously I have learned to look a little harder at this pre HT. Has this happened to anyone else?

Thanks!

 

[JeridJohnson]

if the bend is isolated to the tang you can heat that up to a nice red heat and straighten. just don't let the heat ruin the heat treat on the blade.

in many cases when warming a blade to straighten, you will need to over bend to get it to return to a neutral position. many blades break so go easy.

you also need to ask yourself why it warped. uneven grind, bent it while hot on the way to the quench, moved it horizontally in the quench, not properly normalized, etc.

good luck

 

[i4Marc]

Shouldn't be a big deal. You can heat the tang and bend if you like. I tried heating up my blades and using a 3 point jig in my vise a few times and ended with broken blades. Now I use the over-bend with clamps in the temper method and haven't lost a blade since. With this method, do the first temper as is. Starting with the second temper, using clamps and something to jack up parts of the blade/tang if needed, over bend the warped section about the same distance it is warped clamped to a large bar of steel. Then run it through the normal temper cycle. Sometimes it's dead on the first time. Often it requires additional finessing. Do not worry about doing additional tempers as long as your temperature doesn't rise above where you want it to temper. I have run some blades through as many as 15 two hour temper cycles in order to get all the wiggles out but they ended up straight.