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Quenching in tea?


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I suppose the answer to your question is in basic physics of metal quenching. Quenching in tea may be the same as quenching in coffee, or chamomile, right? But might be a difference according to the amount of sugar you dissolve in the tea! Actually quenching imposes speed in metal cooling and this speed depends on liquid viscosity  liquid density, liquid heat conductivity (water vs oil, composition of different oils) and eventually liquid density. This brings me back to the tea with sugar! One of the quenching medias is water + dissolved salt. In other words, water + dissolved solid. You can read several threads here in the Forum about quenching medias, so I am not going to enter in details. If you dissolve solids in water like salt, it is going to change quenching speed, so dissolving a solid like sugar, sure is going to affect quenching speed. Sugar is more expensive than salt, so, I am not sure there were a lot of people willing to spend money to try it, even though you can make your media more dense with sugar when comparing with salt. So if you are willing to try water + sugar media for quenching it may be interesting and tell us the results. You can try soft drinks, honey, molasses, light solutions of sugar, dense solutions of sugar, what ever you wish.

Now, I doubt you can make a solution of tea by it self that is dense enough to affect basic water quenching properties!

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Yes you can quench in tea; very much like quenching in water though the tannic acid may darken the steel some; unfortunately you will probably remove it when cleaning the blade afterwards. The milk and Sugars will make it a slight bit slower quench and bake onto the blade in a mess.

I've used very strong tea to colour patternwelding instead of using ferric chloride or one of the mineral acids; but no lemon, milk or sugar.

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