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Posted

While browsing through some Facebook videos, I saw a clip of a bladesmith with an interesting twist on quenching — or, more precisely, a quench designed to prevent twisting. 

I know that there are people who quench blades between aluminum plates to keep them from warping. This appears to be a way to combine that with a standard oil quench, by hinging the plates and adding long handles both to squeeze the plates together and move the blade into the quenchant.

I couldn’t save the video itself, but here are some screenshots of the process:

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Given that the plates are clearly welded to the handles, I suspect that they’re not actually aluminum. Normally, I’d think that steel plates probably wouldn’t cool the steel fast enough to hit the nose on the T-T-T chart, but since the smith only appears to have heated the edge of the blade above critical and since the quenchant can probably flow in around the plates’ edges, maybe that’s not a problem. 

Thoughts?

Posted

Interesting.  Usually you see plate quenching with high carbon stainless alloys.  As I understand it, the reason is mainly because those alloys need long ramp and soak times that could change the carbon content of the steel if open to the air.  Generally these are heated in stainless steel pouches to keep the oxygen from the steel and then plate quenched assisted by air blast from a compressor or something similar.  The reasons for plate quenching rather than oil quenching have to do with the finish of the blank and the time it takes to remove the blank from the stainless foil pouch.

This seems to be an attempt to avoid warping during an oil quench more than the plate playing a large role in dropping the temperature quickly.  If that's the case I wonder if using some heavy expanded metal or something similar might even be better.

If I'm quenching a thin blade I will sometimes set up a couple pieces of angle iron in the jaws of a vise so I can slide the blank into place immediately after quenching, tighten the vice and then add a couple c clamps on the ends.  Of course I don't know for sure if the blades would have warped or not, but this does seem to keep it to a minimum.  Distal tapers running in both directions from the ricasso area complicate things though.

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