Tempering Temps

[hammertime99]

Could someone give me kind of a general graph of the temperatures you need for tempering common steel types, like O1, 5160, etc. It would just be nice to know, thanks.

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

Short answer - Most carbon steel tempers between 400f and 450F. The blade type and specific alloy make for the exact temper. Temper twice for an hour each, with cooling off to room temperature between temper cycles. The best way to cool off is to run water over the blade or dunk it in a bucket/pan of room temp water.

There is a good section in the stickies that deals with metallurgy and HT. There is also some online HT info books in the sources section. Reading all the stickies will help you a lot.

Alpha Knife and USA Knifemakers have data on most all knife steels.

Crucible steel has the HT data on their site for all the steels they sell, as does Admiral steel, IIRC.

A simple google of O-1 HT ( etc.) will give you lots of data sheets.

The Bladeforums custom search engine will find hundreds of HT threads on nearly every steel known.
https://cse.google.com/cse/home?cx=011197018607028182644:qfobr3dlcra