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My quench tank is at least 15 year old canola oil. MacDonald's et.al. had better look out for OSHA because they've been heat treating fries in dangerous oil then. I do have most of a barrel of...

Martensite, the desirable hardened form of steel, can be a mixture of ferrite and cementite. The amount of cementite depends on how much excess carbon is available and how rapid the cooling to...

Spend some time watching Japanese smiths work sword blades. They seem to work down in carbon content and temperatures we consider too low and they routinely work in steels that require water to...

:beer1: That sounds like a very good set of tools. The accidental hamon is probably due to the lower harden ability of the W2. The section thickness is the limiting factor. There is enough heat...

When I look at the start of the curve, the first thing that comes to mind is that it's not possible to travel backward in time. The time to quench begins on the left most line of the chart, not the...

The chart is a simple time at temperature relationship. This chart is for O1, not iron, nor other alloys. If you want to discuss iron or other alloys we need to be looking at other TTT diagrams. ...

I've attached the TTT diagram for O-1. For any steel, one of these diagrams should exist somewhere in the metallurgical world. The graphs of times and temperatures are based on thousands of samples...

Whether you displace the oxygen with an inert or reducing atmosphere, or burn it off or use a barrier, you are preventing scale formation. That means less work grinding to finish and having good...

If you use the pipe-in-forge method, put a couple small chunks of charcoal down inside (not interfere with room for the blade etc.). It will consume whatever oxygen is in there and give you a...

If you have very good temperature controls a ten minute soak will not do any damage. If your temperature controls are, um, looser then you'd like a few minutes, five would be better and ten maybe...

Let's stick to O-1 and not wander around all over the place. It's an unnecessary distraction.

O1 could have a carbon content anywhere between .85% and 1.0%. None of us could predict this...

Okay, I must have missed something. 10Pups said he took the steel to "past non magnetic". O-1 is a pretty simple steel as most go and served the knife community well for many many years without a...