I recently had an opportunity to work in L6, a steel I've not used before.  I ran across a thread from another forum which suggested that L6 could be treated as an air hardening steel.  I wanted to test this before getting in too deep.  I took some cutoff from the project and following this http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php/655904-All-about-L6, used the procedure in the PDF below.

 

I had 4 coupons of the steel (Aldos L6, 0.225 not ground to remove the decarb)

 

1 I left as delivered

1 air quenched with no temper

1 air quenched, tempered @ 400 for 2, 4 hour sessions

1 oil quenched, tempered @ 400 for 2, 4 hour sessions

 

Detrich at Podforge allowed me to use his Rockwell tester and we got the following results

 

#1  tested 18 Rc +/- 1.5

#2  tested 65 Rc +/- 1.5

#3  tested 55 Rc +/- 1.5

#4  tested 54 Rc +/- 1.5

 

There is a very nice PDF for L6 here http://www.burgessknives.com/media/L6.pdf, and this is the procedure I used.  I can't talk about the project, yet, except to say it's a hard duty blade and in the informal tests I've done so far, it's beating my expectations by a lot.

 

Hope this is useful to folks,

 

Geoff

 

Thank you for the info Geoff, I recently picked up some (presumably L6) bandsaw blade chunks from iron in the hat and that will come in quite handy in the future :) though I may have to rerun the test with the same parameters on my stock as it is significantly thinner!

I would wager your bandsaw blades are 15N20 and not L6. There seems to be some confusion over the similarity due to the nickel levels.

 

Good test Geoff.

 

Ric

Thanks for posting your test and data / info!