C Craft
Well-Known Member
Bare with me when you start to read this as it is really about knife making! I am not sure exactly how this fits into heat treating of 1080 but, it has got me thinking why this happened!
I was doing a repair on the frame for my bagger on on my riding lawnmower and needed a short piece of metal bar to use as a support.I dug into my scraps bucket and pulled out a short piece of 1080 flat bar left over. It would be perfect for what I needed. After welding the scrap to bar on the lawnmower I needed to drill a hole in it for the bolt that holds it in place. In a hurry and in an effort to get done I grabbed the water hose to cool the weld.
The scrap of 1080 was now so hard that I could not touch it with a bit too drill it! So I punched a hole through it with my welder. Once mounted on the lawnmower I realized that the angle was off on the support. Thinking, no problem I grabbed my homemade turner made from a large monkey wrench and I am going to bend it to where I needed it too be!
However when I put pressure on it it snapped at the weld, (not the weld itself) like glass. So before you tell me, I realize I cooled the weld too quickly. But I also found out some other realizations!
The 1080 got extremely hard when water quenched, and since it was not normalized and tempered it was also very brittle. So I guess what I am saying is I realized 1080 can be water quenched. I am not what the success rate would be using a water quench for blades but it definitely needs to be normalized and tempered afterwards to make a knife blade that is not brittle as glass.
This was a chance discovery for myself as I have always used Parks to to quench my 1080! Does anyone have experience using 1080 with a water quench? What kind of results did you get?
I was doing a repair on the frame for my bagger on on my riding lawnmower and needed a short piece of metal bar to use as a support.I dug into my scraps bucket and pulled out a short piece of 1080 flat bar left over. It would be perfect for what I needed. After welding the scrap to bar on the lawnmower I needed to drill a hole in it for the bolt that holds it in place. In a hurry and in an effort to get done I grabbed the water hose to cool the weld.
The scrap of 1080 was now so hard that I could not touch it with a bit too drill it! So I punched a hole through it with my welder. Once mounted on the lawnmower I realized that the angle was off on the support. Thinking, no problem I grabbed my homemade turner made from a large monkey wrench and I am going to bend it to where I needed it too be!
However when I put pressure on it it snapped at the weld, (not the weld itself) like glass. So before you tell me, I realize I cooled the weld too quickly. But I also found out some other realizations!
The 1080 got extremely hard when water quenched, and since it was not normalized and tempered it was also very brittle. So I guess what I am saying is I realized 1080 can be water quenched. I am not what the success rate would be using a water quench for blades but it definitely needs to be normalized and tempered afterwards to make a knife blade that is not brittle as glass.
This was a chance discovery for myself as I have always used Parks to to quench my 1080! Does anyone have experience using 1080 with a water quench? What kind of results did you get?