Thread: Looking for the best heat treatment for O1

Originally Posted by shooter74743

...Do you have one of the razors in hand that does not meet your expectations? If so, would you consider breaking it and taking some good pictures of the particle grain? Even if you can't get pictures, it will show more than your guessing...besides, it's not performing to what you expect.

Only other thing I can think of is your quenchant temperature. I have found that cold oils don't quench seem (to me) as well as warmer oil.

I agree Shooter but let's allow gregg71 to get his feet under him first. If you're going to photograph the broken blade, take a picture of the cross section not the profile, we want to see the end grain where it's broken. If it's not good grain it will look like beach sand and that means the steel was overheated sometime in the past. If it looks gray and the grains are difficult to see without a magnifying glass, your heat treatment and the steel are probably good.

Warming oil can increase the quench speed (I did mention that O-1 requires no delay removing from heat to oil?) and produce a harder blade than cool oil, but there's a balance point. The cool oil will quench the very edge easily and might make it too hard and the spine might be slightly softer. The warm oil will give the whole blade a more even hardness but at too warm, will produce lower hardness overall. This will take experimentation and good notes in gregg71's shop and he will then have a good graph to predict hardness for himself given his tools.

Gregg71: if you are willing to break an unsatisfactory blade...you are welcome into a club of daring individuals (mostly insane with occasional moments of brilliance). A lot of people will not risk all that hard work grinding something beautiful only to destroy it in the search for knowledge. On the other hand, it's only steel and that's cheap. And what is time when you're having fun being creative?