Recent content by Brian West

Duncan you make some good points. My heat treat recipes solid. Rockwell tester is probably the more responsible, but the mill would be more fun for sure! I will see if I can buy both used. If not, then the mill it will be. Thanks for all the input guys.

Ahh, I forgot to mention, I have a little metal cutting bandsaw that works well and I have a wood cutting bandsaw as well. My grinders are a homemade 2x72 that works well and a 1x42 for light work. I wasn't thinking Rockwell tester, but that is a great idea. Thanks guys!

I have 2 grinders, a heat treat oven and plenty of hand tools. Wondering what you would buy next if you were me? I have about $1000 budget. Was thinking a mill or surface grinder or ? Thanks guys, Brian

Thank you. This is entirely addictive.

I really need to land on a design and make a bunch of them. Seems to me I could improve my skills doing the same one over and over. Great job and thanks for sharing!

Finished no. 5 a week or so ago and no. 6 tonight. No. 5 is 3/16" 1095 about 5in blade with 4.5in handle. Tried dymondwood for the handle and while it was easy to machine, it chipped out on me. I will go back to micarta and wood. No. 6 is 3/32" O1 with a scandi grind. Cocobolo...

The only problem you will encounter with using your heat treat oven to temper is getting it to cool down in time. Mine can take quite a while to cool down and most hardening/tempering recipes that I have read about strongly suggest getting the blade into the tempering oven asap. When it is...

Fire it up and see how hot it gets underneath. My oven is 3in off the table and the table barely gets above ambient when the oven is 1500F. The outside of my oven is just warm to the touch really. A quick test will tell you what you need to do.

Oh heck yes!!! PID $35, 2 relays $20 and 1 HT K thermocouple for $9 = a fully automatic heat treat oven.

I had added the 1200F stress relieving cycle from my O1 recipe. Thanks for the correction on normalization. I was confusing the two because of sequence in reading other recommendations. The only way I have to determine hardness is "skating" a file over the knife (qualitative at best)...

I finished my oven recently. Bought the elements at budgetcastingsupply.com . I used the following element: #7103: 240 Vac Kanthal Heating Element - 2300 °F Max. 1ea CN76000 PID and 2ea NTD2425 Crydom relays. Picked up both the PID and relays on ebay for less than $50. Picked up a high temp...

Wow Kevin, that was an amazingly helpful reply. Thank you.

Thanks One for the fast reply. A question for you. As I understand it, temperature has a greater affect on grain growth then time. Will I be getting into trouble by going over 1475? Would I adjust my soak time at 1550F?

So I have answered some of my questions by reading the "Last question for a while" thread. Great info in there. Let me qualify my question a bit more. The blade was 90% ground when heat treated so the edge was ~0.020 thick and the spine was 3/16in thick. If I understand the other thread...

I did some research and followed the heat treating advice of Kevin....mostly. Where I strayed was with the quenching medium. I understand 1095 requires a fast quenchant like brine or Parks 50. I only have medium oil (canola) so that is what I used. Based on my qualitative observations after...