Author: Larrin

Annealing, Austenitizing, Cryo, Heat Treating and Processing, Normalizing, Quenching, Tempering

Introduction to Knife Steel Heat Treating from a Metallurgist

Larrin

Join the Knife Steel Nerds Patreon if you want to support knife steel research and get articles and videos early. Or go for the “Ultimate” tier and get a Knife Steel Nerds mug!

Intro

I have many articles about all of the nitty gritty details of heat treating and the metallurgy behind every step. However, there may be some cases where knifemakers are afraid of all of the terminology and science and think heat treating is too complicated for them. When it comes down to it, the steps of heat treating are not particularly difficult. When you follow a recipe for how to make cookies you don’t need to know the science behind every step, but following them will still get you cookies at the end. An expert would know what went wrong if your cookies were too crunchy, too puffy, spread out too much, etc. And how to modify the recipe to change the flavor and texture of the cookies. However for most of us we will just follow the recipe. You can do the same thing with heat treating knife steel! So for this article I will tell you how to follow a datasheet. I will include some links to articles with more information about what happens in each step, but you can get to those when you are ready. Another great place to learn more about heat treating is my book Knife Engineering: Steel, Heat Treating, and Geometry. read more

Annealing, Heat Treating and Processing

How to Anneal Stainless Steel After Forging

Larrin

Another rather large heat treating study! This one took quite a bit of time, effort, and money. If you want to support further research visit Patreon.com/KnifeSteelNerds and become a Patreon supporter. All of the money I receive that way goes to knife steel research. And you get some perks like seeing articles and videos early, and at a high enough tier you get a free Knife Steel Nerds mug! read more

Steel and Knife Properties

Knife Steel Nerds at Blade Show 2024

Larrin

I will be at Blade Show Atlanta again this year. The big thing on my schedule is a Blade University class on June 7th, Friday morning. I have done different Blade University classes the past few years and it has been fun each time. This is a general class on thermal cycling using a lot of past studies that we have done which have been published to the website and in recent years to YouTube. However, we did a new study on AEB-L and MagnaCut to have better data on how to “thermal cycle” stainless and high alloy steels and we had some very interesting and exciting results. I am hoping that we can get some more bladesmiths to start forging stainless steels instead of the nearly-universal choice of carbon and low alloy steel. Buy tickets here: https://bladeshow.com/buy-tickets/ read more