What are people using as quench buckets? I'm wary of using (and possibly melting) plastic, and I have no clue just how wide or deep a bucket needs to be to be useful for general forging.

I use a large plastic bucket and have not any mishaps. You just need to be a little wary so as not to melt it. However if you can find a nice galvanised metal bucket, that would do you nicely. A small wooden barrel aswell if you can find one would be ideal. Plastic is fine though, just be careful with it.

Generally you don't need a qench bucket except for hardening and sometimes tempering steel. Cooling mild steels fast is ok, but getting in the habit of doing so can be desasterus with medium or high carbon steels. 

 

If you have a good farm supply store near you, your bucket selection will increase immensely.  For the small stuff I prefer a stainless steel milking bucket--never gets skanky with rust and not all that expensive.

Your profile says Maine so be warned of bucket freezing--they'll often blow out the bottom as the ice expands.  The milking buckets are one piece so won't do that (although you might have to pound a bulge back in place so it sits flat).  Galvanized utility buckets tend to be constructed with a bottom insert.

Keep plastic buckets out of the sun so the UV doesn't make them brittle...or use livestock watering buckets designed to sit in the sunshine.

needed one in a hurry last september for an event, galvy bucket got a hole in it the day before so cut the top off a fire extinguisher and used that, have been using it ever since

( 2 gallon water type with co2 cartridge )

Plastic bucket  I put a hardware cloth basket inside to catch and retrieve small cutoffs.  Didn't want old blind poodle blundering into a  hot slug. just picked up with tongs and dropped in.

 

I use an empty 25lb cat litter tub.

Pretty much anything that holds water! My home forge has a half 200 litre drum that works well. In my smithy at work I was fortunate to find an old copper boiler in the scrap. Our plumber soldered up a couple of holes in it and it's a great quench tub. An added bonus was that we found an old hollow tree stump into which the boiler sat perfectly.

You can see it in the corner of my smithy, under the fire hose.

 

2 minutes ago, ausfire said:

My home forge has a half 200 litre drum that works well.

For those of you unfamiliar with the metric system, half of 200 litres is 100 litres.

I use 35 gallon drums. I have one for water (quenching), one for wood ash,(annealing) and another for oil,(quenching). I love em. I get them free from work, but they are cheap, tough and readily available everywhere.

D

I use a variety. At work it's the galvanized buckets for water, which inevitably leak, so have to be sealed first. Then make sure a student doesn't get hot metal on the sealant, grrrrrrr. At Fort Vancouver it's wooden tubs. For demo's I usually use a wooden bucket I coopered together, just have to remember to presoak so it'll hold water as it dries out between demo's. For quench oil it's either an ammo can, or a wood box with lid, I plan on eventually getting large pipe for bigger things, super quench is in 5 gallon plastic bucket. Fort's ash for annealing is in a 5 gallon bucket. Works vermiculite is in a metal bucket for students. I have my own 35? gallon drum with two bags of vermiculite for my own use at work for annealing.

So just by meself I manage to use a variety for whatever fits the task.

Aluminum kegs with the top cut off are great and so far, my favorite. No rusting problems because aluminum and there are handles built into them to easily shuffle them around as needed. 

I use a stainless vat, and wire mesh basket, salvaged from an old deep fat fryer.

It's just about perfect ..... 

 

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3 hours ago, JHCC said:

For those of you unfamiliar with the metric system, half of 200 litres is 100 litres.

Yes. The drums I mentioned were previously known as 44-gallon drums. That's imperial gallons, not your U.S. gallons. One of our 44s would be over 50 gallons U.S.

Anyway, a half 44 makes a good sized quench bucket.

I needed a bucket fast one day and while looking around I saw a pile of the super heavy rubber water buckets we used for the horses before they left, don't have to worry about freezing and blowing out the bottoms, these buckets froze everyday for months for years.   

An old soup can or a watering can allows you to get away with a smaller quench bucket and ease frustration when you're working on long or irregular shaped items that won't fit all the way into your bucket. Just lay your work over the bucket when you pour your water on so that it gets recycled and doesn't make puddles on the floor.

These are also useful when needing to spot quench. E.g when you're twisting and you can see one area of the metal is twisting faster because it's hotter so you can dribble a little water over that spot to cool it off & let the twist in the slower area catch up.

 

I've got a couple.  An aluminium fire extinguisher with the top cut off I use for oil and quenching longer blades. (Rare these days) - a small Galv mop bucket with the mop bit cut out is my main quench bucket and I have a large blue water barrel that gets used from time to time as well. It's a bit too big really and can get in the way but it's handy from time to time. 

Best one's I've seen are the stainless/ aluminium beer kegs with the tops cut off. 

Andy

 

I prefer to have my "quench bucket" long. I avoid tongs as much as I can and when the stock becomes uncomfortably hot, I dip my left hand holding the stock but with the business end above the water.

 

Most of the smiths around here, myself included, use beer kegs with the top cut off. Mine is the old style beer keg with the rounded sides rather than the newer straight sided kegs in use today. I made a sieve/screen out of galvanized expanded metal with a handle that comes above the water line to fish out small pieces/tools/etc. that get dropped in the quench bucket.

I threw a piece of scrap sheet metal onto the bottom of my plastic kitty litter bucket, so if the tip of my blade accidentally hits the bottom it doesn't melt through.

I have a 20lb propane tank that I cut the top off of.  Freezing doesn't hurt it just makes the water to hard to use quickly.

mine is plastic.   An old DE pool filter housing.  the pic is sideways.  not sure how to fix it.    has screw holes in top flange so I store some drifts in them.

Quench Bucket?  I don't use a quench bucket for general forging.  Most of the ornamental stuff is A36 which can have trouble if quenched.  I toss it into the desert to normalize. If I need water to localize a heat I use a free 5 gallon plastic bucket and dump it on the mesquite tree that shades part of the shop when I'm done.  Why do you think you need a quench bucket?

For heat treat quenching I generally use the bottom of a welding gas cylinder mounted in a wooden frame to make it much harder to knock over and filed with vegetable oil.

Why? because it allows me to keep one end cool so I can use my hand rather than tongs. 

Well, I must be fancy, mine is made from half of a old wooden wine barrel. It works really well, and holds lots of water.