Category: Annealing
2 thoughts on “Annealing”
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Introduction to Knife Steel Heat Treating from a Metallurgist
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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.
How to Anneal Stainless Steel After Forging
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!
How to Thermal Cycle Knife Steel
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How to Use a Steel Datasheet to Develop a Heat Treatment
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Annealing Part 2 – Temper Annealing, Cycling, and Final Properties
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I was interviewed by Shawn Houston on his Youtube channel about the micrographs article. See the video here.
Background
How Annealing of Steel Works – Subcritical vs Transformation Annealing
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Why Anneal?
There are three primary goals of annealing steel:
- Make the steel machinable so that it can be easily cut, drilled, and ground.
- Setup the steel for austenitizing and quenching (hardening) so that is has good heat treating response
- Provide the best possible properties in the final heat treated product
The above goals are not always 100% compatible, but we would like to offer the optimal combination based on our priorities. However, to know what the trade-offs are we need to know how annealing works first.
Cru Forge V – Toughness testing, Processing, and Background
Cru Forge V was developed by Crucible for those who forge their steel for knives [1]. It was developed shortly before Crucible’s bankruptcy and is reported to have been tested with the help of knifemakers Howard Clark and Dan Farr and that the code name prior to its official name was 1086V [2]. The steel is not listed anywhere on Crucible’s website and does not appear to be in production any longer, but as of March 2018 is still available from some third party steel sellers [3][4][5]. The steel has the following composition [1]:
What is the best temperature for L6 family?
Annealing?
Heat Treat?
Tempur?
There are recommended normalizing, annealing, austenitizing, and tempering temperatures for L6 in the book Knife Engineering.