16 hours ago, ThomasPowers said:

What gives you the idea that you can harden brass with heat treatment?  

What did Neddy write that gave you the idea that he was going to harden this with heat treatment? If you read his post carefully, he explicitly says :

16 hours ago, Neddy said:

I wasn’t going to attempt heat treating

I read his original post to say something like: I think brass looks cool and want to practice shaping grinding before attempting this on a good piece of steel.

 

Neddy: I say go for it.  Many smiths and blade makers will suggest practicing forging and grinding on mild steel to prevent wasting a 'good' piece of steel. Post pics as I'd like to see what you come up with.

"I wasn’t going to attempt heat treating at this stage just shaping it as a bit of a fun project"   Seemed to indicate to me that at a later stage he might try to heat treat a brass knife. As the heat treating one usually does with knives is hardening, I felt he had a mistaken belief that it could be hardened by heat treating. (Annealing, normalizing and sometimes even tempering may not be done on a blade; but hardening is strongly suggested!)

I never suggest practicing on mild steel as it allows you to practice bad habits---like working too hot or too cold that you will then have to unlearn when going to high carbon alloys, (which also work a bit differently as well!)  Even grinding you can get used to overheating the blade; not a problem with mild; but... If you practice with a high carbon alloy you can also practice your heat treating on it too and any "ugly" blades won't be missed when you test them to destruction to see how the forging and heat treatment affected the grain structure.

Lastly if you have "beginner's luck" on a blade you can heat treat it and have a knife and not a mild steel KSO.  As I can buy spring steel for US 20 cents a pound or even get it free I don't see the cost as playing a role.

 

Fair enough, after the explanation.  

This shows, what I see is a major problem with what I see as our over-litigious society, and that is finding the balance between having to assume that someone is an idiot so you don't get sued, and giving them credit for having a brain.  

 

Personally, I would much rather have people not treat me like an idiot, and realize that failure is a part of life, and my only fault would be not to learn from the failure.

Remember too that anything you post is posted to the world and while the person who wrote the post may be a subject matter expert; a lot of folks reading it will not be well informed and so excess information may be directed towards them.

I've made a lot of mistakes over the years---I can show you scars to document some of them too; I want new folks to learn from mine and go on to make new and improved mistakes---that hopefully I can learn from myself.

20 hours ago, Neddy said:

Hi all.

Welcome to IFI...have you read this yet? READ THIS FIRST  Knowing where in the world you are located helps with answers.