Realistic performance drop for s35vn without cryo?

[Justin Schmidt]

Hey all. Long time no talk. Got some s35vn I wanna heat treat but with the Corona virus I cant get any cryo at the moment. Was wondering how much it would hurt a small hunter if I didnt use cryo? Thanks

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

It would be hard to give exact numbers, but with no cold treatment I would expect a rather high RA. Maybe as low as Rc 60 as-quenched.
You should be able to get dry ice from as grocery store. That will work just fine in place of cryo. At the minimum, placing in the coldest freezer you have available will help somewhat.

 

[TILLER]

You could do use something like MG super cold. It is an aerosol freezing spray. Supposed to get down to -60 if I recall correctly and can be ordered from amazon. It is basically the same as a canned air duster. I don't have any edge performance tests to point to, but as an experiment I used D2, did one with the supercool and one dry ice. I did not see any difference in hardness out of the quench or after temper. Dry ice would probably still be a safer bet but -60 is probably better than not doing a cold treatment.

 

[Larrin]

The starting point is to do a range of austenitizing temperatures with your coldest possible cold treatment and measure the hardness. Above some temperature you will get a drop in hardness from excess RA and you will know to absolutely not go higher than that.

 

[shqxk]

Stick with medium to lower end of austenitizing temp. Like 1950F and put it in the freezer for about 1 hour and tempering around 350F. This will give you around 60HRC with more than enough performance.

 

[Josh Rider]

I’d save it for when you get cryo.
Why pay the money for high performance steel and shoot for less than optimal results?

 

[Kevin Kf knives]

So after reading a couple of articles about retained austenitine, I still have no idea why it's bad, does it make the steel more brittle, softer, is the grain bigger? All I see everyone agrees with, is that it's not good and you won't get the performance you would get with cryo.

 

[Larrin]

So after reading a couple of articles about retained austenitine, I still have no idea why it's bad, does it make the steel more brittle, softer, is the grain bigger? All I see everyone agrees with, is that it's not good and you won't get the performance you would get with cryo.

A little bit of retained austenite isn't bad, it's when you have too much. Try reading again: https://knifesteelnerds.com/2018/12/10/cryogenic-processing-of-steel-part-2/

 

[JTknives]

Hey all. Long time no talk. Got some s35vn I wanna heat treat but with the Corona virus I cant get any cryo at the moment. Was wondering how much it would hurt a small hunter if I didnt use cryo? Thanks

Send it to me, we got all the “cryo” anyone could need.

 

[Justin Schmidt]

Send it to me, we got all the “cryo” anyone could need.

You're always my go to guy for heat treating bud