Jim, I think that quote is a bunch of bumpkiss.

 

Quenching in water can cause cracks in the steel...... if it's not a water-quenching alloy.

 

If you look at the inside of the big loop on my striker, you can see that it's got some cracks in the inner curve.  These were caused by it's sudden and unexpected quench in my slack tub.  They were on the outside of the curve, so I reversed everything to help close them up.  That's why the surface looks so chewed up from over-heating.

 

I've never noticed a difference in spark quality or length of burn.  I would hypothesize that such a thing is possible, but is dependent on the alloy that you're using.

 

To quench every single striker I've ever made, I had brought them to a hot orange color and quenched them in motor oil.   You can choose to do differential hardening where you only submerge the striking surface and leave the curls exposed to the air.  This will cause the striking surface to be rock hard, but the delicate parts will simply be normalized.

 

If you did just dunk the whole thing and want to draw back the hardness on the delicate bits, just chuck the striking part into the vise and heat up the thin parts with a blow torch or a large chunk of iron that's been heated to orange in the forge.  

I found if they're too hard the sparks were hissing white sparklers and didn't last long enough to reliably light char. The color I liked best was med-high orange, they were big fat and lasted several seconds or more. I don't have any more of that steel but it was 3/8" hex bar. I've used coil spring steel and found targeting the hardness to produce fat orange sparks seemed to work best.

 

I think I've found my main demo projects for the Art On Fire event, Saturday 06/21 at the Wasilla Museum of Industry and Transportation by the Wasilla airport.

 

Was that a plug? Oooops. <look of wide eyed shock>

 

Frosty The Lucky.

The term is Knuckle dusters Frosty, not busters.

I've always thought it was knuckle busters, because they go on your knuckles and bust jaws.

JimsShip,

 

That's a very reasonable explanation for your term of choice. I've always heard dusters but never got a reason why.

Its funny you mention that..Down here they wouldent look twice at a pair of knuckles. They are sold at every flea market. Though this is rural Appalachia. Solving disagreements with violence is still sociably acceptable here.. :blink:

We quench most of our strikers in Parks 50 and leave them dead hard..They keys to stopping brittleness is stress relief. We use several normalizations or a 2 hour stress relief cycle @ °1200..

The term is Knuckle dusters Frosty, not busters.

 

I said knuckle Buster? I meant duster, I know that. A knuckle buster is a stuck bolt under the hood only an open end wrench will reach.

 

Anybody know how to disable the auto spell correct running on Firefox? Oh wait, maybe it's the automisspell running in my head. <sigh>

 

Frosty The Lucky.

Brainstorming with a friend on future projects we'd like to try, the idea came up to turn something like the hybrid into a belt buckle, that way as long as you had pants, you'd always have a bottle opener, flint striker, and maybe  tweezers!
Anything else to add?

Magnifying glass? Seriously, how about a tinder box.

 

Frosty The Lucky.

All true, Frosty.  One can never be too prepared, and it's usually the oddest thing that catches us out..."

By this logic, perhaps it should also have a cant hook so Frosty can roll the trees off.... *ducks*

Good idea but the cant hook needs to go on my hat.

 

Frosty The Lucky.

Here's a thought on where the other stuff goes if you made one into a belt buckle, make a small brass or bronze box (think snuffbox or altoids tin) that would clip into the center of the buckle, and let the outside "frame" of the buckle be the striker. You could put the char cloth, piece of flint, penknife, fishhooks, spare emergency ciggy, whatever in the box. Be one helluva heavy belt buckle though, better wear suspenders too. You could even do a repoussee of a hunting scene or something to the lid of the box to pretty it up.