How Much is too much?

Dustin

Active Member
I have 2 knives I ground out of damascus ([FONT=Open Sans, Arial, sans-serif]1080 and 15n20) I know I made a mistake with the heat treat recipe the first and second time. I overheated them by 50 Deg or so. How many times can I Anneal these 2 blades and reheat treat them before they are ruined? I've annealed them twice. the way I knew I did something wrong is when went to etch the damascus the were really dull the contrast just wasn't there. I think its called crystallizing or crystallization? I've kind of left these under my oven not knowing what to do with them. [/FONT]
 
Steels like those.....you can redo the heat treat again and again and again and again. If you suspect you overheated it, might be a good idea to re-set it with a normalization. Hit 1550F or 1600F, and let it air cool. If you can then do that again at 1500F, and air cool. Then once again at 1450F or so, air cool. Now your blade is re-set (normalized) and we've taken care of any grain growth issues. If any machining is needed to be done at this point, you can bring it up to 1500F and let it cool very slowly in a bucket of wood ash or vermiculite or something like that. No need to worry about carbide placement issues during the slow cooling with a steel like 1080 or 15n20. If you are ready to harden.....then bring it up to 1500F and quench. If you have the ability to soak for about 5 minutes, the Nickel in the 15n20 will benefit from it.

You can re harden a steel like 1080 or 15n20 multiple times. Doing the whole routine I mentioned will not be necessary if you didn't suspect over heating it. But since you did suspect it, I would re set it with normalizing.
 
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