'Evening everyone,

Having escaped last month from my little apartment into a house with a nice big garage/shop, I have finally begun building my forge and collecting the bits and pieces to do some blacksmithing at home. One project that will be coming down the pipe at some point will be turning an old farrier's rasp into a knife and (eventually, once my skills have developed a bit) a razor.

Obviously I won't want to be working on the rasp as-is as it's bloody hard. Any suggestions regarding annealing it to make it workable? Anything to make sure I avoid? I am familiar with the more traditional blacksmith's approach of eyeballing temps by colour and I lack accurate high-temp thermometers, so unfortunately #s won't be of much use to me. But if you have any advice that can be related to colour or magnetic properties I would really appreciate it.

No rush at all BTW. I need to finish building the forge then get used to using propane rather than coal, which all my other blacksmithing has used, so it will likely be quite some time before I tackle this project.

Thanks