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I Forge Iron

hunterNDN

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  1. Thank you all for answering and sharing your ideas and oppinions! Much appreciated! Also ,sorry for the late reply. Kinda lost track because i was working it out on my own and the notifications landed in the spam :/ But what I found out may interest anyone who ever has the same problem. It is quite in line with what Kozzy has shared. So i took different stock of what i baught for c45, hardened different pieces with different methods and did several pieces in different temper collor of each stock. (everything was forged down to similar size in a couple of heats first) and the stock i used for the hammers was noticably softer than my ussual stock but still useable, so if they bothe were c45 then indeed the results can noticably deviate from stock to stock.
  2. I've been making re enactement weapons for about 6 years now and Have made them out of 5160 (or something similar they were old leaf springs) or c45 which is easy to get I normaly keep 1084 for my knives. as far as alloying is concerned never heard any rules about it. it's generaly the shape of the "point" and the state of the edge that is important (although that has a relation to the hardness of the material). i've had a bottom blast with coal, a atmosferic gas forge on propane and my current one side blast mostly fired with cokes (and sometimes soft wood coal which I make here from time to time) and scale and decarb can be a problem with al of these options but mostly with smaller items the number of heats doesn't get out of hand but this particulat piece has a lot going on if you are doing it by hand and it might be that the blade just doesn't have the juice left for any substantial hardening :p then again a soft blade is better than a brittle one in mock fighting and at least it's still harder than mild steel :p but it's still a shame if it doesn't come out like you intend it to. on the other hand this is try 2 the first try was made from a piece of railroad track but something similar happened, to much heats ,to much working time, (there's quite a difference in material needed to make a pollhammer head as oposed to a mordaxe, about twice the material in the blade area) and cracks appeared in the blade and poll (or it is not the composition of steel i believed it to be althpough I did an oil quench) It might simply be better to make these "bigger " items when I finally start and finnish my forging press, but funds won't allow it at the moment.
  3. Hello Thomas, already ground into it to rule that out :/ But I'll grind off some more tomorrow. I'm going to try a third hardening anyways after some testing with the parent bar. but thank you for the heads up. is it possible that the blade is not very thick and it didn't have that much carbon to start with, even the core is decarburized to much to realy do anything? I don't know to much about decarb so I don't know how deep the layer of decarb can penetrate especialy in medium carbon steels.
  4. Thank you! I have updated my account and added my location. As for the rest of the information I knew most of it but thank you for the reminder!
  5. Hello, thank you for the fast reply! I'm working in a side blast forge with cokes. c45 is very similar to 1045 , should at least heat treat similar to 1045 as far as I know but maybe someone with more knoweledge about alloys will chime in. for the rc, I tested it (read bang together and look at the dents xp) against a piece of c45 that I heat treated sucsesfully. should be about 50rc I recon (some testing it against files , testing it for rebound banging it againsdt other pieces of steel :p) i don't have a RC measuring device nor some of those testing files so the only thing i can do at the moment is look at what the steel does compared to other pieces with a known or at least better known rc. If you know a good way to accurately test the rc (without having to dish out large amounts of money) please do tell. bottom line is,the hardness i'm getting is softer than what I'm used to which would be spearheads and hammers, all be it smaller ones about 30mm square and poleaxes also about 30mm square) As far as the thickness of the axe goes. The beard is only about 1/5 of an inch in thicknes and the edge itself is 2,5mm (blunt axe head for reenactment) and there was enough scaling indeed, don't have a power hammer and have to do everything by hand without a stricker. relatively heavy stoch 40mm square and upset it for more material at the blade end.
  6. Hello everyone! So I've been blacksmithing for several years and have been following this and other forums equaly long but have never posted anything yet. But now I have a question. I've been heat treating several hammers and axes lately and have not gotten the hardnes I wanted. The hammers are axeptable I think mid 40's HRC (still a bit on the soft side compared to my reference pieces of 1045 but doable) The axe (mordaxe with blade and poll) just realy does'nt want to the blade didn't harden after 2 attempts and the poll only slightly I think low 40's Its about as hard as an old normalised leaf spring I have lying around here. So some parameters. hammers and axe are made from ,the same stock of c45. I'm hardening in brine 4pounds of salt in 4gallons of watter and added some dishwasher. Heated to 1500-1550f° (I'm gaging temperature by collor so maybe the pieces where a bit hotter but not hugely so). Did not let it soak for 10-15minutes per inch of thickness though but never had any problems with that before.Quench by Plunging and agitating until it stops screming then let the residual heat temper the piece to about straw and try to keep it at that temp for a couple of minutes. Normalised the pieces before hardening (only do 1 normalising sycle for thicker stuff). Heated to 1500-1550f° (I'm gaging temperature by collor so maybe the pieces where a bit hotter but not hugely so). I was wondering If anyone had an explanation for this? note the axe took a lot of heats to finish could it be decarb? checked hardnes before and after removing some of the top material. PS. Sorry if I didn't pose the answer in the right topic and excuse me for any spelling mistakes English isn't my first language :p Thanks in advance! Nick
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