Aluminum Quench Blocks, Will This Work?

Edwardshandmadeknives said:
I use a vise with aluminum plates, and clamp the blade in, still in foil if I’m using it. I don’t use a lot of pressure, probably about 50 lbs, and they come out nice. One thing that you need to do is make sure you use foil or a purge. I run nitrogen purge gas in mine, so I rarely use foil anymore. The high temps and long soaks that stainless needs will really scale up bad if you don’t.
Click to expand...

I had a brain fart once and put a couple of 440C blades in the kiln with no foil. You are not kidding about scale. Basically ruined the blades for anything but personal use and a hard lesson...
 
Here is the article I remembered from Knife steel nerds Larrin Thomas. .
Using the freezer or liquid nitrogen also raises the austenitizing temperature that leads to maximum hardness: 1925°F with room temperature, 1950°F with the freezer, and 1975°F with liquid nitrogen. The peak hardness was increased from 62.2 Rc with room temperature to 62.8 Rc with the freezer, to 64 Rc with liquid nitrogen. Higher austenitizing temperature means more carbon in solution for higher hardness, but more carbon and chromium in solution also increases the amount of retained austenite. At some amount of retained austenite, usually in the range of 15-20%, the soft austenite begins to affect the bulk hardness of the steel and the hardness drops. This was also seen in retained austenite measurements of AEB-L:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top