Why grind bevels after heat treat?

R

RRybicki

Joined
Sep 22, 2006
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I am sorry ahead of time if this has come up before.

Until recently I have not had the ability to do my own heat treating. Now that I can I was wondering why some makers chose to grind after the blank has been hardened. Is there an advantage to this or is it just a matter of preference? This has never been explained to me and I can not find any info. I would like to understand this and see if this is something I should be doing.

Thank You.
 
Butcher Block,

Is it worth the extra effort grinding? What do you prefer doing? Does it depend on what steel you’re using?

Thank you
 
What Butch said...warpage. You'll find it more common amongst makers who tend to use thin steels. For this reason, many folder makers profile and drill, then heat treat, and grind bevels afterwards.
 
I make folders and the majority of the blades are .110 or thinner. It is easier to keep the blades straight and true during heat treat if they are not ground. I have to be a bit more carefull after heat treat to not ruin the temper. I use a ceramic belt and keep the blade very cool.

I have had several occasions where I heat treated a blade, ground the blade and then figured out that I didn't get the blade hard. In each of these cases I re-did my heat treat and the blade edge warped badly. I wasnt able to use the blades. I now have a Rockwell tester and test each blade for proper Rc before grinding and re-do the heat treat as nessassary.
 
for warpage like was said, and also with the new cermanic and exotic belts we have now it's not that much more difficult to grind hardned steel and you only have to finish the thing once, not finish, then re grind after heat treat. I've only done it a couple of times, mainly on thin blades and it works well.
 
on the higher vandium steels i use i like to get most the grinding out of the way first but stuff like cpm154 or 440c i dont mine so much grinding hard

one nice thing about some of the cpm steels i work with is the tempering temp is 1000 so you have to be realy boneheaded to burn that when grinding hardened blades

hell the first few knives i ever made were flie knives that were full hard and i ground them on a 4x36 :barf:
 
I've done it both ways with good results.
Another reason to HT before grinding thin blades is, depending upon the procedure you use, those very thing blade sections tend to cool really fast between operations (such as between high-temperature and quench.) I don't like the irregularity of it, so I prefer grinding after.
I grind blades with a mister or cold-air-gun going to keep things cool.
 
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