Soap detergent quench

Mark Williams

Mark Williams

Moderator
Joined
Nov 28, 2000
Messages
4,760
You just never know what will happen. This is 1084 quenched in 140 degree blue dish soap.

Mark

smskin3.jpg
 
Hi.... This may be a silly question but I have to ask.
Was this intentional? I have heard of and use dish soap in a water bucket under my grinder to keep the dust/sparks down but I use a separate "clean" bucket of water next to the grinder to cool the blade.
Jim Ziegler
 
Stark Raving curiosity. I mainly wondered if scaling would be reduced. It definately was.

Mark
 
That's interesting -- did it bubble (sorry, I had to ask) :D You may have found a great quenching medium.
 
There's a blacksmith over on anvilfire.com that uses a dish soap mix for quenching low carbon steels. He highly recommends not useing it for higher carbon steels, its to quick and will cause problems(cracks)in high carbon and high alloy steels. I don't know exactly what his mix consists of, but you might go check it out. I believe they call it super quench.

Bill
 
The surfacants in the detergent make this quench faster than water. They disrupt the vapor jacket that forms around parts quenched in plain water.
 
Mark Do you suggest it as a quenchant yet? Are you still testing? You may be on to something here. Let us know more. That blade looks very clean. Is it right out of the quench or did you clean the scale off before the pic?
 
?
The blade doesn't look fine to me... It seems to have a lot of cracks running vertically near the ricasso.:confused:
 
Originally posted by Alarion
?
The blade doesn't look fine to me... It seems to have a lot of cracks running vertically near the ricasso.:confused:
Click to expand...

Gouge (Mark) can better answer than I but I believe that is grind lines. Some folks use no finer than a 120 grit belt prior to heat treat then finish them up afterwards. Many makers that forge or use carbon steel do this. It saves quite a bit of time if done correctly.

That is one clean looking blade!:D
 
I thought so too, but the front part of the balde is free of those lines. So I thought it could be cracks. Well, guess Gouge knows :)
 
:mad:
I did no sanding in the direction of ricasso to tip. Now what im not sure of is if these scratches are from shoving the blade in and out of the coke, Or if they are indeed cracks. I know for sure that this is some pretty crappy steel to start with. I also know that I need to hurry the hell up and build my gas forge. I may have gotten the steel way past proper working temperature a few time while I was forging. I'm going to try this again with the same material and do a stock removal blade and try the soap again and see what happens.If somebody else would try it and post the results let me know.

Mark
 
I dont think there are any cracks just grinder scratches. I still cant get over how clean the blade is after quenching. I say temper it and bend it, if those are cracks you will find out in a hurry. The bend test will also tell you if you indeed overheated the blade when forging. Propane is lower heat than coal unless you have too big of a blower. I have melted cast iron in my first propane forge with too much air.
 
I do hope this works. The scale that did occur during quench was a sitting in the bottom of the jar when I got done.If you look at the picture the lines do follow the contour of the grind, not the line of the forging.I will make another to test as Deb has already claimed this one for kitchen use.

Mark
 
The black smith name is super quench the recipe is: dump the following into a five gallon bucket 5lbs salt disolved in a gallon of "hot" water, an 8 oz. bottle of jet dri(dishwasher aid),and a 16 oz. bottle of blue dawn dish wash liquid. Remainder with tap water to fill bucket. Can be used warm or cold its function is to harden low carbon steels, a-36 or 1010. It would work on chisels and stuff made of rebar. I believe it to be to fast for complex steels,and may cause micro fractures. Ive used it on rail road spike knives, they never broke, using the superquench as an edge quench. I think i found the recepi on anvilfire.com cant remember....
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top