What should I use for clay hardening

Kyle Royer

Kyle Royer

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Dec 6, 2006
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My name is Kyle Royer, I was wondering what to use for Clay hardening 5160 and 1075, what to use for clay is my question. I have one recipe but it uses a bunch of weird things (5 different things) so I was wanting to know if there was a simpler recipe. Thanks.
 
I use natural clay from a deposit that is about a 1/2 mile into our land. I sent a sample to Sam S. along with some satanite. He could tell you which one is preferable because I've never used satanite for quenching.

For small blades just natural clay is fine but for large blades you want to use a mixture of clay, sand/crushed sandstone, and charcoal powder in a ratio of about 1:1:1. This helps prevent cracks in the clay.

-Dan
 
Satanite is the usual material.
I am not sure what you are going to clay coat the 5160 for (perhaps to avoid scale?) ,but you won't get much or any hamon with a deep hardening steel, like 5160. 1075, on the other hand ,will give a superb hamon.
Stacy
 
I think this may be one of those things that varies from shop to shop. I have done experiments with claying half a blade with satanite and half with black 3000F furnace cement, and have found that in both adhesion and insulating to control hamon with ashi, the furnace cement wins hands down. Much of the eclectic mixtures in the clays was for the purpose of finding something that would stick to the blade without cracking. The actual activity in the hamon is more heavily influenced by how you heat it and how you cool it. BUt at any rate the furnace cement works great, applies like cake frosting and stays plastic at high temps, resists cracking and pealing away and is cheap and very available at any hardware/department store near the wood stove and frireplace supplies.
 
Indeed satanite can crack, peel and fall off, especially if it dries out too quickly or is mixed unevenly. You can create a support structure for the clay with bailing wire which can help keep it all together but that just adds another step to the process. Furnace cement, on the other hand, can work stick to the blade more effectively than satanite, but can also be very messy to work with.
 
A little caveat on the furnace cement. If you try to use it over anti-scale compound in thin layers, it does not seem to have the stiction that it does on bare steel which is another way of saying it peels/falls off in places where it doesn't wrap around the entire blade. I am going to go back to applying the anti-scale on the parts not covered with clay even though the clay leaves a rather rough surface underneath.
 
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