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What do you anneal in

etp777

etp777

Joined
Aug 12, 2002
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jOK all, as most of you,a lways looking to improve my product, which casues probelms at times, as with my slow production, I often get several ideas of new things to try out and end up doing them all in one knife, which could be bad, but so far I'm alright(but one I'm working on right now is new heat treatment, new handle attachign, first bolsters, etc etc etc).

Anwyays, Looking to add an annealing step in to my heat treating process to see if it helsp. Not sure quite where I'll do it, but probably somethignm along Ed Fowlers input on my O1 thread. Last two knives got a flash normalize, regular normalize, flash normalize, hardening(edge quench in goddard goop), two horus at 300F to remove initial brittle ness, and are about to go in freezer for 24 hours, then will get 2-3 mroe tempers at higher temps(one higher than other as it's a bigger chopper).

So I want to add an anneal step in there, but what do y'all use for this? Does sand work alright, esp if I add some other heated steel in there with it(seperated by an inch or two of sand) to help make sure there's more heat in there and slow the cooling? or do I need to get vermiculite or something else, and if so, where do I get them. Thanks again for all the help. Hopefully will have a picture of at least one of these in a week or so as I find time to work on it.
 
Hi, O1 is annealed generally in the forge, use your ashes, just bring up to critical, completely cover & cool as slowly as possible.

Just a thought, why do you need to raise the temperature in one of your tempering stages? O1 is a pretty forgiving steel, but decide what hardness you need & temper accordingly, try not to improvise, is my advice ;)
 
I was doing two at once, a bigger chopper and a smaller utility one, and just wanted a temper to remove initial brittleness before I stuck them in freezer. Raising temperature on next steps to get them to actual hardness I wanted. Or rather draw them back as I wanted. I think that made sense. :)
 
ept777,

Like Colin KC already stated, ashes will work just fine but only if you have ashes to use. Are you using a coal forge or propane? I have a propane setup so I opted for the vermiculite option. You can get it at your local nursery (the kind with flowers not kids) ;) The only problem I had was finding a bag of a reasonable size that would fit in my Jeep. I also had a problem with it being moist when I got it. I had to spread it out on my driveway to dry in the sun before I could use it. I have been using 5160 and it's working great for me.

Good luck,
Rick
 
I have found both vermiculite and perlite at Lowes and WalMart, under $3 a bag if i remember right. In the garden section.
 
I've used vermiculite from a garden center to good effect in the past. It helps to preheat it with a big chunk of scrap steel (I've got a pile of old mower blades for that purpose) and sometimes I'll sandwich the blade in the vermiculite between two preheated chunks of steel also to allow even slower cooling.

Be aware that vermiculite may be bad for your health. A lot of makers have moved to using agricultural lime instead. Jerry Fisk responded to a similar thread on this recently and mentioned he uses the lime now. I will probably move to lime myself soon, in the mean time I try to only use the vermiculite outside in the open air and avoid making any airborne dust with it (I may be wrong but I think it actually has asbestos in it).

Also you don't want any portion of the blade, like the tang, exposed to the air either as that will allow the heat to escape.
 
Vermiculite, if memory serves from survival info, is crushed up ancient sea creatures(some kind of fossilized remains), so I don't think it has asbestos in, but it might. I don't quite know what asbestos is either, except for it's bad. :)

Course, have to be careful with lime too, lime'll give you nasty burns if you aren't careful, and not even sure what it'd do if breathed in, but couldn't be good.
 
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