First attempt at stainless steel

Gene Kimmi

Gene Kimmi

KNIFE MAKER
Last night I finished the heat treating on my first stainless knives out of AEB-L. I'm going to grind a few of them and do some testing to see how the heat treating went.



When plate quenching with compressed air, how long should it take to cool the blade down enough to handle? I have 1" thick aluminum plates and it was taking at least 1 1/2 minutes to cool the blade to around 100 degrees.
 
GeneK said:
how long should it take to cool the blade down enough to handle? I have 1" thick aluminum plates and it was taking at least 1 1/2 minutes to cool the blade to around 100 degrees.
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It seems like mine take about that long, and I don’t use compressed air. My plates are in a vise and I just clamp them in there.

The plates themselves get hot enough that the blade will stay pretty hot to the touch for a long time if you leave them clamped up. I plate quench and then remove the blade after about two minutes and lay it on my drill press table. The blade cools the rest of the way faster doing that, and also frees up my plates because I typically have several blades in the oven.
 
On the advice of a Sandvick engineer I set the plates in sink and mist water over them - helps keep the plates cooler. Speed of cooling is so much an issue since the only need is to get below around 1100⁰F in less than 2 minutes.
 
Thanks everyone. I heated and quenched each blade individually as I wasn't sure what the extra soak time would do to a second blade while I quenched the first. In between blades, I put the plates in the deep freeze while the next blade was soaking.
 
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