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I Forge Iron

Making punchs and chisels?


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  • 2 weeks later...

A.R. I found that when heat treating it helps if your shop is really dark, or you do it at night. That way you can see the steel colours much more easily. 

Have a decent sized magnet to hand, one from an old speaker is ideal. You can heat the steel up and hold it to the magnet, then watch the colours change as it goes from non-magnetic to magnetic. The colour difference isn't much but if you do it a few times you get more of a feel for it. 

 

I don't tend to bother heat treating my punches as they just loose their temper anyway. Spring steel is tough enough to punch through hot steel as it is. 

 

I recommend you get a copy of Mark Aspery's books. They're worth their weight in gold. 

 

All the best 

Andy

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  • 2 years later...
On 6/10/2015 at 9:02 PM, ThomasPowers said:

You can cycle most steels numerous times with no issues.  Some alloys you should normalize between runs.  remember only the area you have  thinned down to test need to get up to austentizing temperature before quenching.

What is "normalize", mean?

I apologize for my ignorance. 

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Normalizing is a heat treat used to remove stresses after machining or to refine the grain structure before hardening. It consists of heating a piece to critical temp and then letting cool in still air.  Some steels do not profit from normalizing; S-1 for instance.

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On Monday, August 07, 2017 at 4:54 PM, ThomasPowers said:

Normalizing is a heat treat used to remove stresses after machining or to refine the grain structure before hardening. It consists of heating a piece to critical temp and then letting cool in still air.  Some steels do not profit from normalizing; S-1 for instance.

Thank you, Sir!

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