Hope no one minds me blasting this thread with so many photos.
Had an exciting HT session last night. I went ahead and did it because I didn't want to waste a nice dark night. I do my HT'ing in a forge. I don't fully trust my Paragon and how can you see the colours through the door?
And when you have a sword at that temperature, it tends to get a little droopy if you don't watch it.
So, I heated it up, sprinkled it with anti-scale compound.
No pictures in process as I had to turn out the lights and concentrate but here it is out of the Parks50. Has anyone else quenched using anti-scale compound? I should have taken a video, the blade
screams as it's cooling. It's a crazy sound, even more violent sounding than a sword into water. A quick test with a file and it skated nicely along the whole edge.
So, I thought this was going to come out like a pretzel. It's not a thick blade and quite wide and with the draw filing I took the edges down to about 0.018" but it came out STRAIGHT! I don't have to adjust anything! I was very happily amazed! Either luck or I did something right.. probably luck.
Pretty colours. Again, the Paragon isn't the greatest at holding temperature but that could be because I have the 36" model with one thermocouple. I set it first for 460℉ and checked in and it was up at 480℉ but then settled back down. I let it go for 1 1/2 hours and it was still straight so I put it back in at 460℉again for 2 hours but set the ramp speed at 200. That seems to keep it in a tighter band of temperature.
[youtube]ub1F-LwXZDw[/youtube]