Heat treat difficulties

MikeS

Active Member
Hello to everyone,
my question is my blades after quench is approx 40 C Rockwell scale, and file bites the steel.
1. Steel is pattern welded 15N20 and 1075 at approx 275 layers, ( my first fully successful billet)
2 blade is .155 in the spine
3. I’m using parks 50
4. evenheat oven at 1500 degrees F. I let it soak 5-10 min
5. At first I tried an anti-scale coating of atp
6 second attempt no anti-scale coating

any suggestions??
 
Have you ground any after heat treat?
How deep did you file?

Sometimes you can get decarb pretty bad. It may take some grinding to get to the hard steel.
 
I’m not sure but I think I got the steel from New Jersey Steel Baron. As far as grinding down — didn’t really measure maybe .005“ guessing
 
A thought should I normalize the blade and try to heat afterwards? Would that help the blade to harden?
 
Oops sorry. Thank you to everyone responding and trying to help me. It’s is appreciated at this end
 
A thought should I normalize the blade and try to heat afterwards? Would that help the blade to harden?
After forging you should normalize to get the steel in a good state to harden. I’m guessing you got decarb that you are testing that’s throwing your numbers off. After forging I take off about .020 or so just to get to decent steel. The decarb can be pretty thick
 
As Edward mentioned after forging steel should always be soaked 1600 to 1700F to get everything in solution, then normalized.

Perhaps try soaking for 10 minutes around 1700F and air cool. Then do the normalize treatment of 1600F, 1500F, and 1400F with air cooling between each. Then 1500F for the 5 to 10 minutes, then quench in Parks 50 and see how that works.
 
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