Sacrifice to the water gods

JTknives

JTknives

Joined
Jun 11, 2006
Messages
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well today i submited my first clay coated W2 blade to the water gods. well i thought that thy had blessed me with a gift of abslutley no warpage and cracks. so i got cocky and thought befor i put this in the heat treat oven let me grind off the scale and see what the hamon looks like. that is where i showed my lack of faith and the gods where angry. I was allmost dont grinding one side when i heard a PING PING. i was like o crap i'm sorry. any way it looks great except for the 2 cracks thea appeared. so what i'm wondering is if after my 1-2-3- in and 1-2-3 out and then back in, if i went stright to the temper oven that was at 425 deg would i hav been ok? here is some pictures.

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I was wondering if the force of pushing the blade against the grinder was enough to make it happen ? Yeah probably should have tempered first.Hamon Looks good!
 
I think you'd probably been OK if you went straight to the oven before it had fully cooled. Probably more to do with fully cooling than any pressure from the grinder. That said I've not done much with water quenching.
 
....yep, you MUST temper right after the quench. Differentially heat treating puts alot of stress in the steel. Chances are if would have cracked on it's own if you had just set it on the table and didn't temper it .
 
so next time i will go 1-2-3 in 1-2-3 out then 1-2 in then right out and into the heat treat oven while the water on the blade is still steaming. it would be so cool to be able to get good at water quenching. i think it will just take a lot of practis. might get me a bunch of W1 to play with so i dont wast my W2.
 
JT,
You need to cool the blade down to room temp after quench, but then you must temper immediately. With the extreme stress on a water quenched ,clay coated blade, not tempering immediately can allow cracking. Doing any grinding before temper is asking for trouble.
Stacy
 
Temper immediatly after quench. I learned that the hard way too. Thought it's late i'll just wait till tomorrow to temper. just laying on the bench I heard a faint ping that rang in my head like a church bell. Cracked in 3 places. now its quench cool to room temp quick scrape off of clay and into the oven. Water quenched blades are like women when they are under stress ease it as quick as possible or bad things will happen.
 
With Park's 50, I can temper next day or next week with no probs. Water is only used for drinking in my shop :)
 
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