Question(s) for you custom guys :)

[Darksev]

I've had a damn good bit of fun customizing and playing with factory knives, and I've decided to go one step further and do some full on Sev originals via stock removal. I've toyed with a number of ideas, and I thought I would bounce them off you folks, if you would be so kind as to reciprocate After all, the collective knowledge of AAPK got me this far

1) Do it all myself, or farm some work out.
Heat treating is the part I'm worried about. I can handle (I think) everything else, but I really don't have the equipment or capital for a real live furnace or kiln. I've seen that I can use natural charcoal with a bit of ingenuity to create a heat source for working basic steels (one thing I do have is outdoor space). If I end up sending something small, like a folder blade (or 3 or 4) out for heat treat at some place like K&G, is it still "my custom"? Would a place like that even do something like one or two blades, and a few springs for each (just in case)

2) O1 or 1095.
After doing a significant amount of reading on all aspects of these steels, I'm somewhat torn between them. 1095 is a great all around, basic steel, with good knife characteristics. Heat treating is pretty basic (1450ish (cherry) for a bit, then rapid quench in brine... then 450ish for an hour or so i the oven to temper) O1 is similar in usage and treatment, but with a bit more corrosion resistance, and I've gleaned that it may be more forgiving with newbies like myself handing heat treat.

3) Springs
I've assumed that I'd be creating springs from the same stock as whatever steel I've made the blades from. if that's the case, what difference is there in the treatment of them that differs from that of blade steel. I assume they are hardened the same way, but the tempering aspect must be different. Higher heat? longer duration? Everywhere I find helpful guides for heat treatment focuses mainly on blades, and ignores things like springs.

Let loose! thanks in advance

[Diligence]

Okay, here's my ten cents...

1. Farming out heat treating is a perfectly acceptable method. I would just make sure that I stated that the heat treating was done by "xxx". However, I think that you can complete the necessary heat treat steps for your small blades. Do a web search for "tin can forge" and you will find lots of ideas for home made, mini-forges, suitable for folder parts. (try "bean can forge", "one brick forge" for other ideas)

2. Honestly, I would suggest you use whatever is at hand. Myself, I've screwed up 440C, and have decided to only use O1 until I get better - or my skills mature a bit.....I'm still a complete newbie with respect to DIY heat treatment.

3. Springs can be the same material as the blade, just tempered longer so they are softer. I think you want a hardness of Rockwell C of about 43 to 45, versus 56-58 for the blades. You can find info on the web about hitting with a torch (propane) until a "golden straw" color results, which effectively "draws" out the temper. I believe that the tempering process for springs requires a heat soak at a higher temperature than used for tempering the blades. (I'll do some more web research and post any specific data when I have time)

Bottom line, see what you can do with some bar stock first, then do it with a blade you have cut out - have some fun and experiment!

Cheers,
J

[orvet]

I am watching this thread with great interest, to see what you find out. I don't have much to contribute on this topic.
I don't have a forge either, but have been considering making a coffee-can type forge.

Dale

[Darksev]

Well, here's what a few hard days of thinking have netted me.

Gonna do it myself - http://www.navaching.com/forge/heattreat.html is the reason why. I've not seen anything explain all those crazy graphs and processes quite so well. I'm pretty confident in my ability to handle at least O1 now with acceptable results. A good 3/32 x 1.5 x 18 bar from Jantz, already anealed isn't that expensive at all if I do manage to hose it up.

J's suggestions as to the coffee can and small forges also bolstered my confidence. I'm thinking of snagging some of the soft firebricks and putting together a small "2 brick" forge. more than enough for me, and If it doesn't work, it's minimal labor and minimal expenditure (maybe all of 20 bucks). If I'm thinking ahead, I should be able to have someone taking some pictures for me while I work

[gringo]

darksev,
here is a site for a forge. many such sites out there. simple and inexpensive.

http://www.holisticforgeworks.com/gallery/foundry/

[Hukk]

A kiln can be a great investment because of the control you can have over the hardening and tempering processes, though for some tempering a small toaster oven will work just fine. Knowing what I do now, I'd buy a Paragon over my Evenheat. Only if it is the model that can have a flowmeter for Argon at the back (I need to see if my Evenheat can be modified to do this). The advantage of having Argon is that you can do your own heat treating with stainless steel and not worry about scale or using foil packets and Carbon steel also without coating the whole knife in anti scale compound made by Brownell. As for a cryo-temper sandwhiched between 2 heat tempers liguid nitrogen can be purchased at most places that sell Argon, but you would need to rent or buy a dewar. Dry Ice can be purcased by the LB to to a cryo temper as long as you have the proper gloves. It will be a touch over -100 F.

I would recommend getting a HEAT TREATER'S GUIDE Practices Procedures for Irons and Steel. You can weight a year like I did and bought it on a sale or pay $249.00 for this book. It is of great value for quenching, tempering, hardening, annealing, normalizing, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

I bought this book for Ferrous alloys and then picked up one for the non ferrous alloys like titanium, brass, bronze and many others. Iron in it's pure natural state is much softer than bronze.

[brucegodlesky]

Wayne Goddard's "$50 KnifeShop" is a great beginning.
You build a small blade forge for less than $20. But beware, they ar elike Fritos. Can't just make one
O1 would be a better start for beginners, IMO. 1095 composition is too inconsistant these days . O1 is extremely forgiving.
Most of all, just do it, and have fun! bruce/birdog

[Darksev]

Well, I've been holding off of posting, cause I wanted #100 to actually have some content to it

I've picked up some O1 stock, and I've spent some time hacking away at it. What I have to show for it are a few BLO's (Blade Like Objects) mostly so that I have something small, thin, with a bit of a profile to practice heat treating so I don't destroy something I put alot of elbow grease into (all hand tools, remember )

2 of my tiny BLO's and what may be a friction folder blade. dunno yet. Really it's just blade beveling practice at the moment:


Since it was going to be raining this week, I used some of the nice weekend weather and carved two of my firebricks so that I could create my mini-forge. The bricks in question are 2600F soft white insulating bricks, about the consistency of very hard Styrofoam. I use the pictures spoon to do most of the dirty work (dirty indeed. didn't even think twice about using a respirator on these babys, even outdoors)



Once I had everything hollowed, I used some small bits of aluminium angle to re-inforce the edges, front and back, then bound the angles together with Aluminum tape. This should help keep everything together and protect from minor dings while moving it around.



The tape is rated for 200F, so I have a feeling it may fail spectacularly once things get heated up, but, it was worth a shot in my opinion. these bricks are messy things, and if this keeps it a bit neater, all the better.



And there you have it, my scrawny arm and a finished, only slightly ghetto mini forge. the propane torch port is on the non-visible side. Hopefully I'll get a chance to test it out this weekend. Thus concludes my 100th post

[Hukk]

Looks good. If you need some supplies and an answer to a question or two let me recommend Darren and Kathryn Ellis at: http://refractory.elliscustomknifeworks.com Scroll down to the Blue Boxes for supplies for forges and knifemaking. This is where I got the glass for my Bader platens and I suspect I will get some for my 4 x 36 also. That graphite backing wears down fast. It is a decent price for the Ceramic Platen Liners, looks like the same stuff that they use as glass for wood stoves. Thought I was going to save money by buying a bigger piece until I decided that i've never done this and don't want to break it and took it to a glass shop. They were going to charge $7.00 per break until I complaned (whined ) hey it's not gold, they only charged $7.00 total for a a couple scribe and snaps. OK, now I know, I can do it.

They will have something better than the foil, I have some that goes to 2000 or so for stainless steel. Got some quench oil there as a matter of fact, you want the slow one for O-1.

[Darksev]

So, for anyone still interested, here's some new developments.

I've built a new forge. There were some design problems with the last one. Lemme 'splain.
1) I made the cavity to large, way larger than it needed to be, which made it VERY inefficient to try to heat.
2) The corners in the cavity were far to square, which pretty much killed any kind of rotation I was getting with the torch. I ended up with one bright spot on the wall, and not much else.

Lucky me, I ordered more soft bricks than I needed, just for this reason. This time, I approached it a bit differently. Instead of carving each side, then combining them, I combined them first, using my angle aluminum and some new adhesive foil I found (steel this time, not alum. rated for 700F instead of 200. should be damn near perfect) then used a 1.5 inch spade bit to create a straight through cavity that is roughly egg shaped. about 1.5 wide at the top and bottom, and 2 inches high, give or take. I used a file to smooth the surface all the way around. (sorry, no pictures, maybe tomorrow). I now have a smaller, very smooth and rounded cavity, with the flame port near the top, and plenty of insulation brick left around the sides to help retain heat. A half fire brick at the back closes up the rear hole if needed.

I'm getting good rotation inside now, but I've maybe discovered another problem, one which I may have seen coming. I was tempted by the dark side, you see. I made a trip to Home Depot the other night, and picked up a Propane torch and bottle "set" that was on sale. It's your basic plumbers getup.

I do not believe I'm getting enough heat out of the torch. The flame has very little I can adjust, and it's taking well over 15 minutes to get a SMALL test piece up to dark red. I can do it by hand with just the torch in half that.
I KNEW I should have just gone down to my local hardware and picked up the nice JTH7 swirl head torch for 30 bucks, and a bottle of MAPP gas, but..... sale..... Lesson learned.

[gringo]

hello,
lenght of burner is critical to producing temps needed.
i can not remember the name of the burner...it is public domain, plans are out there in the web.
duh...sidearm burner...here is a link..step by step...

http://www.zoellerforge.com/sidearm.html

http://www.anvilfire.com/FAQs/gas_forges.htm

[Darksev]

Gentlemen! Success!

I picked up some MAPP Gas on the way home from work. First off, here's the pictures I promised of the new forge







Notice how smooth the inside walls are, no sharp corners at all. Plus, I blocked up the back end to help retain some of the heat. Next, I fired up the JHT-7. WOW what a beast. If you've never heard it before, it's an impressive roar I set it to mostly full burn, and started the timer. 6 minutes later, we had this:








which is about a million times better than I was getting with propane. MAPP just burns so much hotter. To see how I was doing, I stuck an old Nicholson file in there, 1095 steel, just to see how well it heated. I had a bucket of water handy just in case

3, maybe 4 minutes, I swear, that was it. Bright red, nearing orange and completely non-magnetic. That's 6 inches of file, if I had worked it around the forge a bit, I'd have been able to heat the entire length with no problems at all. My small blades are going to work perfect!



I think we have a winner! I'll be playing with my Blade Like Objects this weekend for sure!

[Hukk]

KOOL, now do you have an oil quench set up and a way to heat the quenchant to 120F to 160F? Good luck - smoke and flames.

[Darksev]

Actually, yes

I've a few large kettles I used for brewing when I started out, Aluminum, before I upgraded to stainless kettles. 5 gallons, with valves installed for easy draining. I've decided to use Peanut oil to start with, as I don't want to make the investment into a full blown quench oil yet. Using the same burner I use for brewing should work out quite well to get my oil to temperature. With a cross section as thin as I'm working with, I don't think it will be an issue, and Peanut oil is rather cheap, and available locally.

Interesting thing I found while looking around at oil. http://www.elmusa.com/products/data_she ... quench.pdf Sorry, PDF file It's supposedly almost as fast as Park's #50, but it's all vegetable based, rather than petroleum. Not as much stink in the oven I think it might be interesting to try it out eventually. For now, I'll keep it cheap

[Hukk]

Sounds like you got it locked in. O-1 likes a thicker oil but a well known mastersmith uses vetrainary grade mineral oil. It may even be cheaper. Your oil needs to be 120 to 160F for O1 tool steel. You can heat up metal objects in your kiln and toss them in to heat the oil - reduces thermal shock - so I hear.

There are a million recipes for quenching - some call it goop. But it sounds like you have everything lined up. Are you going to do a cryo with dry ice (about -110 degrees F.) Liquid Nitrogen (LN) (about -320 to -345 degrees F) you would need a dewar (LN storage).

Dry ice will bring you up about another .5 to .75 on the C scale.

What is your final hardness that you are shooting for?

[Darksev]

I'm going to temper at around 450 for a two hour block, which should get me to around 58-60ish for 01, depending on how the initial hardening goes. That's a decent balance between hard and soft. I'm thinking of possibly cycling it through the over 2 or 3 times. Some of what I've read suggests that that can set the temper a bit better. thoughts?

How would cryo work? Temper, then allow to cool to room temperature, then drop to sub zero for an hour or so, then if need be repeat the temper/cool/freeze cycle a few times to settle everything down?

[Hukk]

Allow the knife to come to room temperature and cryo just once for a couple hours. Allow to come up to room temperature and do final heat temper. It helps to toughen the blade and even dry ice will make it a bit harder. So, you could heat, cryo, heat. The heat must be last. You could buy enough dry ice to fill a styrofoam chest and I've seen where they have used duct tape to seal it. I've heard of a guy doing it overnight with Liquid nitrogen, but that's major overkill. A lot of welding supply and gases sales will sell both LN and dry ice. I know of 4 places around here offhand. LN should have a dewar to hold it.