Heat Treating Is An Art

Status
Not open for further replies.

One

Banned
“Heat treating has long been an art, and like art, it has not been fully appreciated by the masses,” said Joe Warchol, V.P. Technical for Houghton International, a founding member of the CHTE (Center for Heat Treating Excellence). “The CHTE will try to turn this ‘art’ into more of a science, which will hopefully result in more widespread acceptance and appreciation for the benefits and applications for heat treating in industry today. By developing more accurate heat treating methods, the process will be more predictable.”

Heat treating is an art that relies to a large degree on science, not unlike any other art. Heat treating strives to become “more scientific“, but it will never become pure science, due to it’s nature as an art. Heat treating is simply a means to manipulate and predict the properties of steel, but will never be 100% predictable due to the nature of it.

As an art, heat treating requires skill, experience, experimentation, imagination, creativity, intuition and know how. This part will not change and is important to understand.
 
Last edited:
must disagree. we heat treat approximately 12,000,000 parts per year in our facility, over 100,000,000 world wide. there is no "art" involved. part is heated for X seconds(induction heating is so nice, room temp to bright red in 15sec) then quenched for x seconds then on the next operation. failure of a part due to heat treatment is not an option, if it fails your front wheel comes off. it is all science.
Scott
 
must disagree. we heat treat approximately 12,000,000 parts per year in our facility, over 100,000,000 world wide. there is no "art" involved. part is heated for X seconds(induction heating is so nice, room temp to bright red in 15sec) then quenched for x seconds then on the next operation. failure of a part due to heat treatment is not an option, if it fails your front wheel comes off. it is all science.
Scott
I agree Scott, too often people like to use the word "art" as an exclusive club that they control membership of.
 
I think that it depends on how you're set up and what you're working with. It's great if you have the equipment that allows you precise heat control and can order steel that is produced withing tight specifications. Most of us can't do that. Even a heat treating kiln is pushing the budget, especially for something that is just a hobby. We have to deal with heat treating at the level of an art where temperature is judged by eye and adjustments have to be made to allow for the difference between different melts of the same basic alloy. That said, even the art is based on science. Just as cooking is.

Doug
 
I think there may be some unintentional “cognitive bias” towards the quote in my original post and my response to it.

There is a high degree of predictability with current heat treating methodology and art/science.
 
Last edited:
Heat treating steel outside a controlled environment is an acquired skill not an art. Painting a beautiful hamon pattern, using clay, on a blade might be considered art; but following a heat treat schedule is about time at temperature. Without controlled equipment, judging the temperature of a particular steel by its color is a matter of interpreting a color to temperature chart.
 
Fred, I see your point, but let's not forget that aesthetics and art are two different things. Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and perception of beauty. We’re not talking about aesthetics.

The word “art” can have several meanings. For clarity in this case, I think the word art in the quote means something other than pure science, and involves certain skills that are not normally considered part of science.

I really don't want to get into semantics. I hope this helps.
 
Last edited:
Heat treating is an art that relies to a large degree on science.....

.....As an art, heat treating requires skill, experience, experimentation, imagination, creativity, intuition and know how. This part will not change and is important to understand.

I think there is some truth here. If the science didn't happen, it probably couldn't be called heat treating, but there're likely many artful ways to skin a cat. What if the word 'art' though were substituted for 'job', 'calling', 'soul', etc., the comments would still be valid. Maybe heat treating is in the eye of the beholder.

I have noticed that there are times when the 'art' of heat treating seems to refer to the appearance of the final product. Manipulation of surface texture, abrasives, iron oxide thickness and location, etching, etc. are hugely important particularly for the business end of knives, but the functional result of the heat treating probably hasn't change.
 
Perhaps the quote means that they are hoping and trying to minimize (or completely eliminate) "art" as a factor in industrial heat treating... which makes certain sense and is a noble cause.

The only problem I see with it is,... that it could end up being another job killer. To eliminate human skills seems somewhat self defeating.

They seem to have their doubts about it though. So, we can all still sleep at night. I think there will always be a place for "art" in heat treating, though maybe not in big corporate industry.
 
Last edited:
it could end up being another job killer. To eliminate human skills seems somewhat self defeating.
In most industrial setting it's already occurred. An example of this is the jobs eliminated by the outfits that produce 5160......and what did we get? 5160 with inclusions that occurred during the rolling process, which is where the jobs were eliminated.

In an industrial setting, there is little choice but to go the "science" route, for a number of various reasons.

HOWEVER, as heat treating relates to the majority of those who use these forums, there is without a doubt a great deal of "art" and "acquired skill" to it. If it were purely science in the realm of heat treating knives, we would all get perfect results by simply following the heat treat "formula" for a given steel type. Anybody whose made more than a couple of knives knows that we deal with heat treating variables in our shops that simply cannot be eliminated.....therein lies the "art" or "acquired skill". Most of that "art" and "acquired skill" comes out of a failure(s), and our endeavoring to not repeat those failures.

So, I can see both sides of the coin....for repeatability in a mass production environment, industry has no choice but to go with the "science", but that means there is zero room for advancement/improvement (and most often falls into the "that's good enough for what we're doing" catagory). On the other side, we, as knifemakers/baldesmiths, should constantly be seeking improvement, even when we believe we are doing the best possible heat treat. Since we cannot eliminate all the various variables present in our shops, we must use the "art" or "acquired skills" aspect to move ahead.
 
Well put Ed! I couldn't have said it better. :)

They seem to be more concerned with consistency, volume and the almighty dollar than they do with “quality”.
 
Last edited:
Many of the distinctions between “art” and “craft” have long been debunked in academic circles and higher education. They now refer to it as the "arts and crafts", or just the arts.

It's just semantics again.
 
Last edited:
Once I understood the processes involved, it was just a matter of knowing the time and temperature cycles needed to produce the desired results. Heat treating is not an abstract.

I have two people that work in my shop, one is the artist, the other is the scientist.
 
as usual tai, you're showing your ability to edit your posts aren't lacking.

Even clay coating is an exact science for a direct result--aesthetic, but still a particular process for the generation of a particular hamon. Poor technique results in poor results, those times we find that the mediocre are oft excusing their lack of skill as poetic license.There is only poetic irony in calling Heat Treating an Art, but a little to no good effort in doing so because then that small stage is the resulting product, and not the over all finished piece. What good is a choji hamon if the blade is poorly ground, the edge burned out on the grinder, and the handle a mismatched conglomerate of poorly shaped and fitted pieces of plexiglass. There is no excusing the science behind any process, application, or execution as art when the final complete piece is less than the sum of the effort.Creative license is only worth so many efforts, although some have found slapping a label on it like neotribal or being crytpic in wording their description for their methods have found it profitable. There's little good in such promotion because it then leads to so many other "artists" who hack away at substandard work while charging a mint. The result is then when artists do make knives that they find no market because some mediocre hack has already bewiled the public into thinking acid etching is a hamon, or that a piece of copper salvaged from a crap toilet as a ferrule is better than a properly clayed blade, or inset guard.
 
Sorry if I've ruffled some feathers,... but to put it bluntly, "heat treating" isn't a real science. Metallurgy is a science. I think heat treating is going through a lot of the same types of things as "forensic science" is,... if you keep up on that sort of stuff. Sign of the times I guess.
 
I
So, I can see both sides of the coin....for repeatability in a mass production environment, industry has no choice but to go with the "science", but that means there is zero room for advancement/improvement (and most often falls into the "that's good enough for what we're doing" catagory). On the other side, we, as knifemakers/baldesmiths, should constantly be seeking improvement, even when we believe we are doing the best possible heat treat. Since we cannot eliminate all the various variables present in our shops, we must use the "art" or "acquired skills" aspect to move ahead.

i agree with you, although there has been much heat treat improvement in the last ten years at my work. was first done in gas fired furnaces, then electric furnaces, now each part is done seperately in a mini induction furnace. because of where our parts are used(drive axles) there is no "good enough". i am trying to eliminate variables in my little shop as i have moved from charcoal fire to benchtop lab furnace. now if i could only find a local source for decent quenching oil.
scott
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top