Re-heat treatment the O1???

[Troop]

I think I'm just going to throw this blade into the trash and pretend (real hard) that this never happened! Now I'm getting like Andy and afraid to use any steel except my favorite! (Just kidding around, Andy)

 

[Kevin R. Cashen]

Kevin... my tools is an archaic type of heat treatment. I use charcoal to heat the blade that I put inside a pipe and wait till the red glow comes, test it with magnet, put back for 5 second and put it in canola oil.

I will take a picture of the knife and the tool I use to heat treat in these few days to come to wait for my camera. But I already did a file test on the blade and it's hard enough to make the file slide away.

With that method on O-1 I wouldn't lose too much sleep from the lack of temper. That file test will not give much insight into the issues that would lead to or not lead to the stress issues we are concerned about. I recently posted some information and examples of how the file can be useful but cannot be a definitive test of hardness. The file revealed that you have a high scratch hardness, but with that heat treat I would expect a much lower penetrative hardness which would be of the greater concern to whether the steel will suffer from not being tempered.

 

[Kevin R. Cashen]

Troop, I will not spend too much time on the multiple quenching, since it is an excellent way to get U.C.O.K's thread hijacked when the true believers get agitated about the underlying factors. But if the soak times are there and the temperatures are dead on there are two factors left that I immediately think of - loss of carbon in repeated heating, or lowered hardenability due to grain reduction, which really will not be a factor in O-1. I am not at all surprised by you distortion issues, I have chased a twist pattern O1/L6 hunter right around in a circle by repeated quenching without any stress relieving operations in between (just playing, not making one to sell.)

O1 has a few more elements to it's chemistry than many of the steels we smiths work with, it really isn't very tolerant of "creative" heat treating, this is one of the reasons I am hesitant to recommend it as a beginner steel.

 

[Troop]

Troop, I will not spend too much time on the multiple quenching, since it is an excellent way to get U.C.O.K's thread hijacked when the true believers get agitated about the underlying factors. But if the soak times are there and the temperatures are dead on there are two factors left that I immediately think of - loss of carbon in repeated heating, or lowered hardenability due to grain reduction, which really will not be a factor in O-1. I am not at all surprised by you distortion issues, I have chased a twist pattern O1/L6 hunter right around in a circle by repeated quenching without any stress relieving operations in between (just playing, not making one to sell.)

O1 has a few more elements to it's chemistry than many of the steels we smiths work with, it really isn't very tolerant of "creative" heat treating, this is one of the reasons I am hesitant to recommend it as a beginner steel.

Thank you, Kevin. I considered the blade to be ruined after the first quench, with so much warp to it, but I just wanted to see if I could straighten it, in some way. Too much playing around with the O-1.
Thanks again.
- Mitch