Altering a hardy

[Karn3]

Hey everyone, I recently picked up one of these second hand but barely used. Unfortunately it is too big to fit in my anvil. Obviously resizing it is no big deal but I was curious about what heat treatment I should give it once I'm done because heating it to resize it will ruin whatever heat treatment it currently has. I'm a fairly new smith and heat treatment is one of those subjects that I only have peripheral knowledge about so any help would be much appreciated. Many thanks in advance.

EDIT: terrible spelling :/

[Timothy Miller]

You could contact the company and find out what alloy of steel they were made from and follow correct heat treatment procedure for that alloy. If you want to be really sure that they stay heat treated properly you could just grind down the shanks of the tooling. In my experience they are most likely they are made from alloy or plain carbon steel and can be hardened in water but don't take my word for it.

[Frank Turley]

If it's an old hardie, it's probably high carbon, cold-work steel, so you're between a hard place and a rock. After forging, normalize by air cooling from a cherry red. Harden at cherry red, maybe 2/3 of the blade vertically, upside down in oil or luke warm water. Temper right away after removing the oil. Heat the shank and run the heat rainbow till blue hits the cutting edge and quench to hold the temper.

You're in the same situation the old timers were in. You're using cold work steel to make a hot work tool. You realize that the temper will be lost because you're putting hot work on the hardie all the time. I suppose the old manufacturers assumed that if you were a smith, you could redo the tool occasionally.

It would be nice to make the hardie out of hot work steel*, but a large chunk of hot work steel is pricey and is not always available to a small smithy. Hot work steel holds up longer than cold work steel, but it also needs reworking every now and then.

*For example H13; S1; S7

http://www.turleyforge.com Granddaddy of Blacksmith Schools

[pkrankow]

You can grind it instead of forging it and avoid the question all together.

Phil

[ThomasPowers]

Grind it keeping the top section cool. If you have to change the size enough that it requires forging; might as well forge a new one and sell/trade that one.

I'm sort of in the opposite camp---my main shop anvil has 1.5" (3.81 cm) hardy holes. I've made nesting adapters from square tubing but have slowly started making a set of tooling with the large shank---mainly by picking up battered top tools and forging the hammer eye section down to fit in the hardy hole. Seems like most of the battering is in badly mushroomed or cracked striking ends and so not a problem once forged down and dropped into the hardy hole. I usually just normalize for most stuff but will do a full heat treat for items I use a *lot*.

[Karn3]

Thanks for all the advice and info. I think I might just grind it to avoid the additional hassle of heat treating it. Thanks again, you're all super helpful :D

[Fe-Wood]

Thanks for all the advice and info. I think I might just grind it to avoid the additional hassle of heat treating it. Thanks again, you're all super helpful

Think of the opportunity you are loosing to learn about heat treatment- being a grindersmith.... They aren't that expensive if you mess it up. You just don't want to make it too hard. Being that you will be using it for hot work, I don't see even that as being too big an issue.... Just my 2 cents....