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Thread: The Great Razor Analysis Project

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    Josh, do you judge the temp for heat treating by the color of the steel?

    I have never gotten that to work with any consistency, but the magnet trick has yet to fail me. Give it a try if you haven't already.

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    Senior Member blabbermouth JimmyHAD's Avatar
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    Josh, I have a Cattaraugus Little Valley with a crack in the blade to donate to the cause if you want to PM where I should mail it.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Russel Baldridge View Post
    Josh, do you judge the temp for heat treating by the color of the steel?

    I have never gotten that to work with any consistency, but the magnet trick has yet to fail me. Give it a try if you haven't already.
    Russel, have you played around with decalescence-recalescence yet? No magnets needed.

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    Razorsmith JoshEarl's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Russel Baldridge View Post
    Josh, do you judge the temp for heat treating by the color of the steel?

    I have never gotten that to work with any consistency, but the magnet trick has yet to fail me. Give it a try if you haven't already.
    Russel,

    I tried the eyeballing techinque for a while, as well as the magnet. The magnet worked pretty well, but I'm getting much more consistent results using a thermocouple and pyrometer in my forge. I can get the blade up to about 1450 F and hold it there to heat evenly throughout without worrying about overheating.

    I'm finding that getting maximum hardness out of the quench is largely a function of quenching from the correct temperature, which seems to correspond to 1400 to 1450 F in my forge. Even 50 or 100 degrees too hot seems to make a difference.

    Josh

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    Senior Member blabbermouth ChrisL's Avatar
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    I'd definitely donate a Wapi for this experiment. I want to see how one of them really compares with some of the other razors. I'll keep track of this post as best I can to find out when you want razors sent to you.

    Chris L
    Last edited by ChrisL; 05-17-2008 at 05:09 PM.
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    How's this project coming along?

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    Slowly. But it lives on.

    I have about 35 or 40 blades right now, and I need to make time to prepare them for the different tests we'll be doing.

    It turns out that the chemistry department at my alma mater can test for everything BUT carbon, so I'll need to find a lab that can do the carbon content.

    We'll have three tests: alloy content, carbon content, hardness. Plus my eyeballing of the grain size of each blade. (That won't tell us much, unless some of the blades have very large grains.

    I'm hoping to get several projects off my plate by the end of the month, which will open up more time for razor stuff.

    Josh

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    I once thought it would be cool to have a spectrometer for analyzing steel chemistry. There is one that works off of a spark test. Can't remember the name but they are portable units good for junkyards and scrap sorting, that kind of thing. Sadly, they are setup to assess the alloying elements and then the steel is matched to known alloys. Carbon testing is not involved. So I gave up on finding an easy cheap way of spec'ing steels.

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    The original Skolor and Gentileman. gugi's Avatar
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    glad to hear it josh - i will have some blades to send you soon...

    Carbon certainly can be detected, but since it's so much lighter than the other components the problem I suspect is that you can't do it on the same machine. I suspect that the Prof. who Josh spoke with would have been aware if somebody else on campus would have that capability....
    I am not sure that the cheap spectrometers that detect just content that Mike mentions are good enough to quantify the differences in component content we're looking at.

    I wonder how much of an interest such a project would be to somebody like Verhoeven (sp?) - of course if they want to do such a project they have the funds to analyze pretty much anything they wish, so they may not have much interest in us providing a bunch of blades.

    In any case Mike, you probably have much better idea who may be suitable. In a university setting it seems like an reasonable undergrad summer project.

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