Quench Tank for Tridents?

[Frosty]

16 minutes ago, ThomasPowers said:

you've never talked with it?  Oh My!

Hoist by my own petard, good thing it was properly charged. Heck, I've even heard steel say Mmmmmm. Your point sir.

Frosty The Lucky.

[ThomasPowers]

Well actually I thought you might go with that old Goon Show line:   "I talk to the trees-----that's why they put me away..." I can't watch "Paint your Wagon" now without hearing the Goon version...and you did get your face slapped by one....

[Frosty]

I've never seen the Goon Show, never heard of it till now. I live a sheltered life. I can't even think about Paint Your Wagon without wondering about the sanity of whoever had Clint Eastwood sing.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Avadon]

When you are quenching something thin like blades that are wide and flat doesn't a horizontal quench tend to want to warp the blade? I always thought with something like a trident, you'd want a vertical quench so both the front and back hit the quenchant at the same time. 

Also when heat treating something like this do you treat the whole trident or do you treat just the edges of the tines with something like a rosebud torch?

[SLAG]

Frosty,

The goon show was a radio show by the B.B.C. home service. The show ran from 1951 to 1960. The B.B,C. transcription service marketed the show in most countries of the British commonwealth. But not the U.S. 4 people were involved in the show as characters. Peter Sellers, Harry Seacombe, Spike Milligan, and a third chap, whose name I forget. The show was very fast paced, & jammed full of gags. Much of it biting satire. They pilloried politicians, public personalities and all manner of conventional symbols & conventions. Older friends of mine maintain that they usually had to hear the script 4 times to catch all the gags.

I am a little surprised that T. P. knows of the series. I'm not aware that it was broadcast in the U.S. Perhaps years later  in "reruns" His knowledge and scope of interest is very impressive.

Check out an article in Wikipedia it a must read & a real hoot.

It seems that it was televised. I wasn't aware.

SLAG.

[Avadon]

Hey guys, not to be rude, but you're hijacking my thread. Shouldn't these posts be in an off-topic thread somewhere. I'm getting notifications for this thread that have nothing to do with my questions/posting.  Thanks, Av

[Frosty]

Sorry Avadon we thought we'd covered your question pretty thoroughly, I've expended my knowledge of the subject without knowing why you want to heat treat a trident that large.

Looked up the Goon Show online and can see where a lot of the inspiration for Monte Python came from.

I now return the hijacking to you.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Avadon]

Just now, Frosty said:

Sorry Avadon we thought we'd covered your question pretty thoroughly, I've expended my knowledge of the subject without knowing why you want to heat treat a trident that large.

Looked up the Goon Show online and can see where a lot of the inspiration for Monte Python came from.

I now return the hijacking to you.

Frosty The Lucky.

Trying still to get these questions answered:

 

When you are quenching something thin like blades that are wide and flat doesn't a horizontal quench tend to want to warp the blade? I always thought with something like a trident, you'd want a vertical quench so both the front and back hit the quenchant at the same time. 

Also when heat treating something like this do you treat the whole trident or do you treat just the edges of the tines with something like a rosebud torch?

Trying to figure out is a vertical quench or horizontal better when doing the final quenching to get the right hardness on the tines. I'm thinking it has to be vertical, you are basically quenching three daggers at once. I just wonder what the reason is that some people advocate for horizontal. There must be some logic behind that too. 

[dks119]

U.S. Military Surplus PA154 Ammo Can   $22

[JHCC]

6 hours ago, Frosty said:

Looked up the Goon Show online and can see where a lot of the inspiration for Monte Python came from.

The Goons were a major influence on the Beatles as well, in two important ways. First, John Lennon was a huge fan when he was growing up, and the rapid-fire constructed nonsense of their material was -- along with the writings of Lewis Carroll -- tremendously formative in his approach to writing lyrics. Second, one of the Goons' records was produced by George Martin, who had worked with Peter Sellers and was close friends with Spike Milligan. One of the reasons that the Beatles chose to work with Martin's label Parlophone (apart from the fact that practically no-one else gave them the time of day) was because they knew he had produced "Bridge over the River Wye" (a spoof of "Bridge over the River Kwai", with Martin having carefully edited out all the "K" sounds to avoid being sued by Horizon Pictures). Without Martin's production genius and willingness to give "the boys" a shot, who knows what might have been.

 

6 hours ago, Avadon said:

Hey guys, not to be rude, but you're hijacking my thread. Shouldn't these posts be in an off-topic thread somewhere. I'm getting notifications for this thread that have nothing to do with my questions/posting.  Thanks, Av

Welcome to IFI, where no thread is safe from hijacking!

5 hours ago, Avadon said:

Trying still to get these questions answered:

When you are quenching something thin like blades that are wide and flat doesn't a horizontal quench tend to want to warp the blade? I always thought with something like a trident, you'd want a vertical quench so both the front and back hit the quenchant at the same time. 

Also when heat treating something like this do you treat the whole trident or do you treat just the edges of the tines with something like a rosebud torch?

Trying to figure out is a vertical quench or horizontal better when doing the final quenching to get the right hardness on the tines. I'm thinking it has to be vertical, you are basically quenching three daggers at once. I just wonder what the reason is that some people advocate for horizontal. There must be some logic behind that too. 

Warping (as I understand it, and I freely admit that I am no bladesmith) is a function of a number of things, including unrelieved internal stress and uneven cooling. Horizontal cooling can exacerbate the latter, which is why most people seem to prefer quenching tip-first or edge first. With a trident, that would probably mean points-down.

When you say "heat treating something like this", I assume you're referring to tempering? (Remember, hardening is a heat treatment.) I think the answer to this would lie in how you did the hardening: if the entire piece was hardened, tempering just the tips and edges could leave the rest of the trident dangerously brittle. On the other hand, if you had normalized the entire trident and then hardened just the tips*, you could oven-temper the entire piece without having to worry about over- or under-hardening the tines.

I suspect that people who recommend a horizontal quench do so because it's easier to find a wide, flat quench tank that would fit your dimensions than a tall, narrow one. I could be wrong, though. EDIT: looking back, I don't see anyone recommending a horizontal quench as such, just a horizontal trough for doing a tips-only quench, presumably with the trident held vertically.

 

*Normalizing the whole trident and then hardening each tip separately would have a couple of benefits, and this is what I would do if I were making such a thing (which again, to be clear, I have not; everything I'm saying here is purely hypothetical, and I defer to the proper bladesmiths in our midst). First, it would make the whole thing less brittle, remembering ThomasPowers's caution that "*tough* is more important than hard and over time someone *will* hit something they shouldn't and need to straighten [the tines]". Second, if you hardened each tip separately, you don't need a big quench tank: you just need something you can fit each tip into, be that a pipe, a regular bucket, or whatever. Avoids the entire issue. Cut the Gordonian Knot!

[ThomasPowers]

Very good point JHCC; doing each tine separately makes it easier to keep the temps proper for hardening it too.   

Historically such large items were low carbon wrought iron except for the "cutting edges" that were steeled and so it didn't matter much what you did to the shafts as they wouldn't harden.   Having a shaft that could be easily worked straight was considered a feature.

When it became cheaper/faster to make the entire thing from high carbon steel (or medium carbon...) than to forge weld the cutting edges on then we started to see monolithic construction.

[Avadon]

8 hours ago, JHCC said:

. On the other hand, if you had normalized the entire trident and then hardened just the tips*, you could oven-temper the entire piece without having to worry about over- or under-hardening the tines.
*Normalizing the whole trident and then hardening each tip separately would have a couple of benefits, and this is what I would do if I were making such a thing (which again, to be clear, I have not; everything I'm saying here is purely hypothetical, and I defer to the proper bladesmiths in our midst). First, it would make the whole thing less brittle, remembering ThomasPowers's caution that "*tough* is more important than hard and over time someone *will* hit something they shouldn't and need to straighten [the tines]". Second, if you hardened each tip separately, you don't need a big quench tank: you just need something you can fit each tip into, be that a pipe, a regular bucket, or whatever. Avoids the entire issue. Cut the Gordonian Knot!

Can you walk me through how I would normalize the entire trident and then just harden the tips? Would I heat soak the entire thing to correct temperature and then let air cool? And then harden just the blade edges or tips with a rosebud torch?  What exactly are the practical steps in doing this. I just read a bunch on normalizing, hardening and tempering on another site and seems like people are in disagreement over temp, method, etc. So I'm trying to get set straight here.

[JHCC]

Again, I will defer to the actual bladesmiths among us, but there is one critical question: What steel are you using? That will very much determine what kind of heat treatment you do.

[Avadon]

25 minutes ago, JHCC said:

Again, I will defer to the actual bladesmiths among us, but there is one critical question: What steel are you using? That will very much determine what kind of heat treatment you do.

I was thinking 1045 or 1095 or something in 4140. I'm not exactly sure yet because I'm just starting and will likely make the first one or two in mild until I get a grip on how to move the metal.

[Buzzkill]

In broad terms the heat treat of different alloys are similar.  Heat just past critical and cool it quickly, then temper the steel to get the desired balance of hardness and toughness.  However, depending on the alloy, the critical temperature will be different, as will the speed at which the steel needs to cool. That will determine your method of quenching.  Some alloys require very specific temperatures to ramp up and hold for specific amounts of time in order to get the most out of the steel.  Some harden by air cooling, some do best with oil, some need a water quench.  Whatever you use, the manufacturer will have a spec sheet for the heat treatment for that alloy.  If those are followed you will get good results for that alloy. 

In general terms you can learn how the steel moves under the hammer with mild steel, but when you move to medium or high carbon steel it will not be identical.  Some steels are notoriously hard to move under the hammer with a very narrow forging range.  Others are more forgiving.  The point is you'll need to get used to how the steel you want to use for your finished product moves under the hammer, so practicing on mild steel will only help so much.

[Avadon]

44 minutes ago, Buzzkill said:

In broad terms the heat treat of different alloys are similar.  Heat just past critical and cool it quickly, then temper the steel to get the desired balance of hardness and toughness.  However, depending on the alloy, the critical temperature will be different, as will the speed at which the steel needs to cool. That will determine your method of quenching.  Some alloys require very specific temperatures to ramp up and hold for specific amounts of time in order to get the most out of the steel.  Some harden by air cooling, some do best with oil, some need a water quench.  Whatever you use, the manufacturer will have a spec sheet for the heat treatment for that alloy.  If those are followed you will get good results for that alloy. 

In general terms you can learn how the steel moves under the hammer with mild steel, but when you move to medium or high carbon steel it will not be identical.  Some steels are notoriously hard to move under the hammer with a very narrow forging range.  Others are more forgiving.  The point is you'll need to get used to how the steel you want to use for your finished product moves under the hammer, so practicing on mild steel will only help so much.

Excellent, thanks for this breakdown. Can you steer me in a direction that is good for tridents, pole arms and this sort of thing? Ideally I'd love to make some pattern welded steel/damascus but I've got to put in my dues first. Wondering what would be some good entry level steel grades for this project? Thanks for your help.

[JHCC]

8 minutes ago, Avadon said:

Excellent, thanks for this breakdown. Can you steer me in a direction that is good for tridents, pole arms and this sort of thing? Ideally I'd love to make some pattern welded steel/damascus but I've got to put in my dues first. Wondering what would be some good entry level steel grades for this project? Thanks for your help.

There's a whole subforum on axes, hawks, spears, etc. Check it out. 

[Avadon]

57 minutes ago, JHCC said:

There's a whole subforum on axes, hawks, spears, etc. Check it out. 

Thank you. I am indeed aware of that I just thought he might have a suggestion or preference to add before ending my thread.