Heat Treating, general discussion

I'm sure this is a dumb question but is there anything wrong with leaving the piece you are working on in the embers in your forge as a form of normalizing/annealing not quite sure what it would be called. I'm assuming there is something wrong with it sicne i have never read about it. Anywho I was thinking about doing that with my piece tonight. So finding out

I just scored a like new heller rounding hammer on ebay the other day. This is the cleanest one I have picked up yet, the only problem is that someone has heated it up to the point that it slagged up around the eye and the cheeks and it is super soft. How should I go about rehardening and tempering this old beauty? Thanks, Travis Koons

This was my first attempt at a spring fuller. It was forged from the coil spring off of a jeep. Is this spectacularly large grain structure? I failed to normalize it prior to quenching it in oil (mostly canola). I only tempered it for one cycle of about 90 minutes at a bit over 500 degrees. Do you think the failure was due to failure to normalize, tempering temperature, only one temper cycle, something I'm not considering, or a combination of all the above? Today I forged a 2nd spring fuller and did my best to normalize it correctly. I took it above nonmagnetic, then just above nonmagnetic, then just below nonmagnetic and buried it in ashes. Should this help reduce grain …

I've just bought this kiln to try to get to grips with proper heat treating. Not blades but jigs, PH and other tooling. Mostly 4340 http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110563439221&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT There's no temperature controller with it but there's plenty of VERY cheap ones on ebay. They're almost too cheap. Does anyone have any experience of them. Or has anyone got any advice on temepertaure controllers/thermocouples in general. Maybe I should go for a programable controller, eg with times, ramp up ramp down etc?

Most of my tooling is made from 4340 (EN24) with the odd bit off H13. Heat treating is a black art to me and my usual way is forge, cool slowly in a swithed off gas forge (or air) heat to slightly above magnetic, quench in oil, temper at purple. Works well for my purposes and is just about grindable, machinable with carbide tooling etc What I have noticed is that the "as forged" often seem seems harder than my "heat treated stuff" . It wont cut with a bimetal saw blade and can be a pig to grind. Kinda assuming that with small pieces it air hardens because the rate of cooling is quick enough. What I'd like to know is how "usable" it "as forged", if not tempered is it …

i am very new at this as in never got to use my forge yet new. but i am trying to get every thing ready for when i get it up and running. do you guys think that these will work well for quinch tanks they where old acetylene and oxygen tanks that i had laying around or do you think i need to cut them down lower. one will be oil and the other water also what is recommended for the oil and is the water just straight water or is there any thing that you can add to it to make it quinch better. i will be trying to make a little bit of every thing just to learn but will mostly be knifes for know.

so i have been working with an old truck leaf spring making (or trying to make) knives and other bladed objects. i have some some dabbling with quenching in different mediums. water,motor oil (new and used). i heat them up to a tangerine orange color (a bit past non magnetic) then vertically quench in one of the aforementioned. they do get hard but i was just curious what others peoples experiences have been? what works best?

Hi all, I have this hand forged antique wolf/bear leg hold trap which the previous owner had heated the leaf springs so they would lose their spring...sorry I don't know the correct termnology for that. Apparentlly he was afraid someone would hurt themselves on it since it has huge teeth on it, but I'd like to restore it to its original condition. Is it possible to put the spring back into the springs? And without removing the springs from the trap? Thanks, Mark

The tire hammer dies I see are fairly clean. Don't they build a good bit of scale when treated ? Or are they then polished afterward ?

I want to take 2" pipe, cut off the threaded end, flatten the threads out, and use them as a fuller to impart lines in 1/4" and 3/8" round stock. I don't think the threads will hold up very long and wonder if I can do anything to harden them. I assume that most threaded pipe is mild steel. My goal is to make the stock look like vines, or small branches.

Can some one give me the temperatures for the colors that the metal turns during heat treating ?

Anyone know anything about 15-5 ? Reading what popped up on google it sounds like good stuff. I got a few hundred pounds of the stuff and buy a 1000 lb bar of 4x4 at around a buck per lb

At my work we"ve recently been tearing down some mud pumps and rebuilding them leaving us with some very large rollers from FAG and National bearings as scrap, probably in the two to three pound range. My question is what type of steel are these rollers likely to be and what would be good applications for them if they are worth my time? Thank you.

http://www.sugarcreekind.com/big-knife-kiln-p-2809.html I have been talking to Sue at Sugar Creek and she has priced this unit with a digital controller for $850.00 shipped to my door. So I was wondering if anyone had used this unit and your thoughts. Thanks for the help in advance

I have a job to do where the specs call for quench and tempering to 241/277BHN. My machinerys handbook says to temper to 1300 for 241BHN which is awfully close to the quenching temperature. I am thinking that I will probably get inside that hardness range with just normalizing. I was told that was the way a similar forging was heat treated at the now defunct blacksmith shop at a local steel mill. These are just chisel points that are going to get welded on the end of pipes. Are there charts in the ASM heat treaters guide with this sort of information? Are the charts more exhaustive than in the machinerys handbook? I have been thinking of buying this book but it …

i was thinking of buying some 4140 as big a bit as i can afford and having it heat treated by a professional.how hard is hard enough for this type of anvil,any advice would be greatfull thanks mat.

Hello all I thought this Hardness Gauge would be an interesting project. http://www.rayrogers.com/rhc_plans.htm

I picked up some drill rod , Letter E Tempering Medium: W-1 , Has any one had any experience with tempering it, and what are some good applications for its use? thanks for any help, kevin

just wondering if some one has tried it or advice.

A few weeks ago I forged 50 scraper/chisels for a customer out of W1, quench and tempered to 50-65 Rc. which is what the customer specified. The chisel is 1" diameter then is a 3/8 thick blade tapering down to a 1/8" thick square edge. In heat treating them myself I had two of them crack near the edge so I had to make one more, I should have made the extras to begin with but this customer will not accept extra parts so I didn't want to sit on the inventory. I had 30 more to make this week so I made 34 of them and decided to take them to my heat treater to avoid the cracked parts and because I have a fair bit of rush work right now and I figured that they could do it ch…

hey, i'm about to make a hammer for a friend of mine who is just getting into blacksmithing... i just realized i had an old axle laying around in the shop. so i figured i'd ask first before i wasted a couple hours.. axles are medium carbon right? if so will medium carbon be tough enough with just a quench and no heat treating? will it be hard enough? thanks

im new to this and im looking to twist some box steel, i saw it done with cold steel but they said it had to be annealed... as of now i dont have a forge but i do have acetylene tank with a torch but im not sure if that will do it, im not really sure how to anneal metal. can anyone help me?

Is there an affordable/cheap Pyrometer with a working range that would be useful for monitoring a furnace or useful for tracking forging temperatures? I was at Harbor Freight Tools the other day, and noticed a relatively cheap ($30) infrared pyrometer/thermometer that works up to 968 Deg f / 520 Deg C. That 968 Deg is too low to be useful, but it had me wondering if there might be a similar item with a higher working temp. range available, at a similar or relatively low price? copyrighted photo removed and a link placed into the text.

I've been blacksmithing for something like four years now and have only been messing around with carbon steel for the last year. I still don't know anything about it, as I don't have a teacher and so no hands on pro-experiance. However, I have made a variety of tools this summer using oven tempering. I've made 2 hole punches, 2 eye, punches, 2 knives, a cold center punch, and I'm working on 2 chisels now. (One flat one curved face.) I usually forge, anneal twice (if grinding,) quench at critical, and then oven temper at 2-350 degrees. I don't know if this is correct procediure or not, but I will say this much. None of my tools have cracked or chipped and my blades hold a …

Hi guys can anyone help me find a distributor for park AAA Quench Oil I don't need more than a 5gal. bucket. I'm in the Portland Oregon area something local would be great but don't think I'll get that lucky