Brian Dougherty

I'd guess that it is fully hardened, just very malleable due to the geometry and materials in the san-mai construction.

If the core is relatively thin, I could see the mild faces taking a set and forcing the core to follow. Just like you see in a blade with mild or wrought iron welded to only one side. Those you can straighten after heat treat just by bending them by hand.

Wait! A chainsaw pack? I thought you Scandinavians still used axes for everything! Seriously though, it looks like a nice pack although it also implies a lot of hard work coming your way!

Josh, I didn't have the fortune to know Tim, but obviously he had a significant and positive impact. I feel for your loss, and would encourage you to hold your head up high and carry on using and disseminating the knowledge he shared. Do so with all the traits you admired of his, and he will be with you forever. The measure of a life well lived is how long people tell good stories about you, so keep telling his stories.

That is understandable, but there is a big difference between quenching c95 in water and c60. You might try some simply ground blade-shaped test pieces to build your confidence in a water quench with the c60.

There are many here much more knowledgeable than I am about this, but it is probably a basic carbon steel. You might try buying some 1075 or 1060 to see if it behaves in a similar way.

That'll take a knuckle to the bone in the blink of an eye. I've always liked that feature as well, and I think it is one of the touches that makes the grinds on your blades so distinctive. Do you freehand in the feathered portion by eye on the edge of the wheel, or is there an easier way to get them that consistent?

That is apparently more significant that I thought. I don't mess with micarta much, but paper micarta is layers of a paper material bonded together with resin, as opposed to a fabric material, right? Is that why the surface looks more uniform than say burlap?

I wouldn't have guessed that was micarta from the pic!

I used to walk to radio-shack when I was 12 and spend my allowance money on the stuff so I could make some new circuit board I had dreamed up. It messes up hardwood floors, and stains tube socks a really nasty orange color, but I'm perfectly fine. I mean aside from gaining weight, balding, middle-aged, high cholesterol, can't remember crap, joints aching, and just generally being a nerd... ...wait, I live in America. I can probably sue the FeCl people for some or all of that!

Neat The Fairbairn/Sykes has never done it for me. (I know, sacrilege!) I think I'm turned off by the solid metal handles I usually see on them. However, a nice blackwood handle on one would change my mind! Not to mention a Mulkey pattern welded blade...

I bought a new 10" contact wheel, but needed to make a new spindle to bolt it to the work arm.

That's a fair question Joël. In my forge I don't try to measure the temperature, I just look for the decalescence. I Guess I don't really know what my quench temperature has been for quite a while now. It's never mattered because I have always let the steel tell me when to quench rather than the temperature. I had 1550F stuck in my head all this time because I heard that as a decent quench temp for simple carbon steels. For all I know the same source probably told me to quench in virgin lamb urine while the blade was pointing north! This points out to me that before I start blindly using temperatures I need to dig Verhoeven's book out and read it more thoroughly.

Thanks all. I agree with the idea of normalizing after forging. I do that to get rid of the odd hard spots that tend to wreck drill bits, but my process has been so disjointed and beginnerish that I just got into the habit of doing again right before quenching. I can probably start refining that a bit as I am not quite as disjointed as I was a couple of years ago. The oven has really come about as an option for the folders I have been working on. It is an attractive option with these little ~3" blades as I can set them in the oven, and just pick them out with a hook on the end of a wire and quench. Aside from the forging involved in making the pattern welded bar stock, these have all been ground to shape. I normalize the original parent bar when I am done forging, but primarily to eliminate any hardness, so I can't say I have refined the grain much. As stated above, I should start doing a proper normalization at that point to save myself time and fuel. From what you all have said, it sounds like I could do a series of normalization runs at 1550, 1500, 1450 F and just leave the blade in the already heated oven for ~10 minutes each time to make sure it was up to temp without worrying about grain growth. Then go back to 1550 for the quench cycle. (all my blades are a 50/50 mix of 1095 and 15N20)

Ok, this is going to sound really dumb, but I have been struggling to figure out how to use and oven for heat treating I’ve been making a number of smaller blades lately that would easily fit in the small heat treating oven I happen to have. (This was bought for non-bladesmithing purposes) It seems like a natural thing to use the oven rather than my forge as it would allow for much better control of the temperature, but as I went to do this the first time I realized I have no idea how to heat treat in an oven. In the forge I do the following: Normalize by moving the blade in and out of the forge (propane) until I see the shadows from the decalescence stop. (Or at least move out of the region I want to harden) Then I allow to air cool while hanging vertically. After the first normalization step I look carefully and correct any warping before repeating the same heating and cooling process 2 more times. Then I heat the blade up the same way one more time and quench I have always thought that an important part of the process is to not have the blade sit at high temperatures for any longer than necessary to keep the grain from growing, so I don’t dill-dally in this process. Perhaps this is where I am wrong. If I set my oven to 1500F for a normalization run, and let the blade soak in there to make sure it is up to temp, won’t I be letting the grain growth happen? If so, how do you minimize the time in the oven, but make sure you are getting to temp since you can’t see what is happening? Obviously I am making this too complicated, but I’ve gotten so used to watching for the phase change that I don’t know how to do anything else. How do you guys that use ovens do this?