A gentler quenchant

[jayco]

A while back, a neighbor I've known most of my life,came to my shop one day and wanted me to "beat out" the edge of his old , blunt mattock.

He meant draw out and taper,but that's how older folk around here would phrase it.

I must also point out that the man is 74, able bodied, and was eager to help.

After a minute or so , we(actually he) decided that he would do 'the holding"......and I would do the 'hitting.

That's not my usual way of working, but I've known this guy a long time.

After a couple of heats and some hammering on my part, he said "good enough".

All this while he had been telling me how he used to help his Grandpa in the blacksmith shop more than 60 years ago.

While he was telling me these things, I was thinking about how to quench this thing.

Well, I never got the chance to quench in oil as I had planned.

At the last hammer blow, he promptly took the quite hot mattock outside the shop and slammed the cutting edge into the damp ground in front of the shop.(It had rained the day before).

That was a real surprise for me......I had never seen anything like that before!

I asked him why he did that......and he said "that's the way Grandpa always done it"! 'Cools stuff slow so it don't crack"

certainly not a scientific method of quenching.....if it's a 'quench' at all!

Has anyone else ever heard of this?

James

[ThomasPowers]

Weygers mentions a south east asian smith quenching a knife in a melon that matched the curve of the blade to produce a hard edge soft back. Theophilus mentions quenching engraving tools in a hunk of wax; all variations on the above method.

Note that all of these methods are duplex ones where the hardening and tempering are done together.

Thomas

[BT]

Jayco
Several old smiths around here that I knew did the same. They always referred to it as ground temper. Never tried it myself though, as it seems to me that the water content of the soil would vary so much as to give inconsistent results.