unknown steel heat treat

C

Cojab

Well-Known Member
Hello,
I know this is a tired subject but looking for possible help.
I have a bunch of knife blade blanks. (30-40 of them) They look like Spyderco folder blades with the big Spyderco hole in them. A friend of mine gave them to me and he said he got them from a garage sale. I am currently talking with Spyderco to make sure these are not stolen or conterfeits as I dont want to infringe on them or use stolen property. I did however take one of the blades and re profile it to attach to a metal handle.
I heat treated this blade to my normal 1084 HT. Set in Evenheat oven, ramp up to 1475, soak for 8 minutes and quench in Parks 50. Checked with a file after this and file definitely dug in.
My guess is these blades are some type of stainless.
Any ideas on how to try treating these blades. It's not really worth it to me to send it off to ID the steel.

Thanks
 
Without paying for the analysis, all you can do is guess. Therein lies the problem when trying to deal with an unknown steel..... you can easily spend a ton of time and effort in attempting to heat treat via trial and error, and hope you get lucky enough to figure it out..... but the odds of being successful are akin to winning the lottery.
 
I was kind of afraid of that Ed. Can you even get these tested? I thought I had heard the places that do that kind of testing wanted like a 1" cube of the material to test. Any idea of what the cost would be for something like that?
 
It's probably more money and time spent/hassle to have them analyzed than their worth. If they are indeed spyderco blades, they probably are a more complex alloy as I don't recall spyderco ever using anything like a simple carbon steel.

You could etch one in ferric chloride or some time of cold bluing to verify that they are at least stainless. Maybe spyderco will be able to help determine the exact blades, where they came from and exactly what type of steel they are.
 
I'll throw out a guess that they're some kind of stainless alloy, probably on the cheaper side, like 420 or 440B. Try 1900 with a 30 minute soak, plate quench, then dry ice or liquid nitrogen, and I'd guess you'd get in the ballpark. Hardly anybody makes production blades like that in carbon steels. It is a crapshoot though, with pretty good odds you'll end up just wasting time and effort.
 
Thanks for the input gentlemen.
I have found that people just don't understand this when they hand you metals they have no idea what it is, and want you to make a knife out of it. Well intentioned but misinformed. At the same time I just hate turning these into scrap metal.
 
PM or email me. I have a couple labs that will analyze anything from steel filings to bulk samples. I don't want to give their stuff out publicly though.
 
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