So i was messing around trying to experiment and see if i could do something different with W2. Its from Don and its probably 2 inch rounds. What i have been doing is slice of and inch and use my mini press to make a bar and then i forge my blade shape from here. I generally forge around 1900 degrees.
I normally do my forging then normalize at 1600, 1500, then around 1450ish , i usually watch the steel on the last normalize and pull it out just after it makes it phase shift. from here i usually do my grinding and then heat treat.
Tonight I did pretty much the same thing but at the last normalize i quenched in a bucket of 120 degree water and then went right into a 1300 degree oven. I have omega thermocouples on the forge and in the oven and all temps have been calibrated against boiling water which i believe is 212 degrees. My reason for doing this was to try and refine the grain further from my previous methods and to finish with a speriodize anneal. Well the anneal worked great as i found out on my destruction. I saw what appeared to be fractures when i got to around 220 grit, at first i went back and tried to grind them out and then got smart and new it wasnt going to happen. At this point the blade was just under 1/4 of an inch think. I put it in a vise and bent it till it broke and sure enough it broke on one of the fractures i saw. It was easy to bend and the grain appears to be nice and small.
So was the water quench to much for the steel even at a thickness over 1/4? should i even bother with doing the quench at the end? i mean it was an experiment but not sure its worth repeating as my previous W2 blades have worked well with my previous methods. Any comments/ideas welcome
I normally do my forging then normalize at 1600, 1500, then around 1450ish , i usually watch the steel on the last normalize and pull it out just after it makes it phase shift. from here i usually do my grinding and then heat treat.
Tonight I did pretty much the same thing but at the last normalize i quenched in a bucket of 120 degree water and then went right into a 1300 degree oven. I have omega thermocouples on the forge and in the oven and all temps have been calibrated against boiling water which i believe is 212 degrees. My reason for doing this was to try and refine the grain further from my previous methods and to finish with a speriodize anneal. Well the anneal worked great as i found out on my destruction. I saw what appeared to be fractures when i got to around 220 grit, at first i went back and tried to grind them out and then got smart and new it wasnt going to happen. At this point the blade was just under 1/4 of an inch think. I put it in a vise and bent it till it broke and sure enough it broke on one of the fractures i saw. It was easy to bend and the grain appears to be nice and small.
So was the water quench to much for the steel even at a thickness over 1/4? should i even bother with doing the quench at the end? i mean it was an experiment but not sure its worth repeating as my previous W2 blades have worked well with my previous methods. Any comments/ideas welcome
