Jerrod Miller

Unfortunately not. At least not anything that would be useful. You could clamp it in a vise though.

I got the go-ahead to make 2 molds of this in our proper anvil alloy (air hardening tool steel). That will make 8 anvils, if they all come out OK (we've only made them out of high chrome white iron as of yet). If they come out OK through HT, they will be up for sale. Well, 7 of them will be. I think price will be $30 ea. plus actual shipping cost. Not sure how it will work, but most likely I'll either buy them myself and sell them on my own, or I think we have a company eBay account that we can post them to. Either way, I'll report back here.

There has been a bad rash of the sales guy in charge of this and I not being around at the same time for me to discuss this with him. I should be able to get numbers by the end of this week though. The biggest problem may be the payments. I may have to buy a lot of them myself, then sell them on my own. I certainly haven't lost sight of this project and will update as soon as I know what can and will be done.

This will likely be the case for you. The only wrench that I have run on the spectrometer wasn't a Craftsman, but actually a higher end (I'm sure everyone has seen their trucks driving around to mechanics shops ). That wrench was only 1040 (once I got through the chrome plating and possibly a carburized layer, I had to grind through a lot to get a good surface to analyze). I would start by a triple normalize. The best way to achieve this is not with a magnet, but looking for recalescence and decalescence. The quench in vegetable/canola oil that is pre-heated to about 130F. The point of pre-heating the oil is to make it thinner and thus conduct heat better. Right after quenching you should do a file check on it. Give it a few passes with a file. You will likely have a decarb layer to file through that will be soft. If the blade hardened then after a few passes the file will start to skate rather than bite into the blade. If it doesn't skate, then it didn't harden. At that point you can either try quenching again in oil (in case you just didn't get it fast enough the first time), or move on to a water quench. If your wrench is something like 1040 then the water quench will harden it up enough to make a pretty decent letter opener. You may get lucky and the wrench may be hardenable though. In which case you should have an oven up to temp and ready for tempering prior to quenching, so as soon as your file skates you can put it right in the oven. Start low on the temper, as you can always go higher. If you use a toaster oven or kitchen oven, use a separate oven thermometer to monitor the temperature, not the one built into the oven.

Colors observed in glowing steel are extremely subjective. What I call cherry red, someone else might think of as dull red. Same for every other shade out there. Ambient light levels screw all of them up for everybody. As far as heat treating goes, the "shadows" are all you really need (except for tempering, in which no color change is helpful, for the more common and basic alloys at least). The shadows are best thought of as an intensity of in brightness rather than color (as that is what it really is).

The best way to find the critical temperature without a thermocouple is to look for recalescence and decalescence. I used to keep a magnet near my forge for checking for non-magnetic, but unless you are using 1080/1084 it doesn't really tell you what you need to know. You can't go wrong with watching for the phase change, which works on every alloy. I no longer have a magnet near my forge, simply because I have no use for one there.

I would highly recommend doing a Google site search for any terms that you are unfamiliar with. This will serve you much better than the search function built into the forum. But in this case, a normalize is a heating and cooling cycle where the part is heated above the critical temperature and allowed to cool naturally in still air to a black temperature (generally 1000F is good). No quenching liquid, no blown air, not pressed between metal plates, no need to slow the cooling rate by leaving in in a forge/fire or buried/covered in an insulator.

The y-axis is labeled as "cross-sectional area", so it doesn't really tell us much since there is distal taper and profile taper. The x-axis is labeled "standardized distance". I assume that means it is essentially unitless.

Normalize (probably best to do 2-3 times) Forge to shape (optional, grind off file teeth prior to forging) If forged: normalize 3 times Grind/file/sand to shape Quench and temper (temper at least 2 cycles)

Also, do not harden your tang. Soft (i.e. normalized) steel should have not problems with pretty much any standard steel you weld with. As in if you used 1080 for your knife and welded on a mild (or 1080, but why would you do that?) tang with mild wire or high strength wire, as long as you welded properly and left it normalized you should have to problems. If you used hard-facing or similar wire/rod you could have problems. Since that is a moot point for you anyway, I would think that if you can get the forge weld to stick, you definitely won't have problems with the normalized tang.

I'd say you did just fine. There is a thread from a while back where different quench mediums were discussed. The main gist of it is that the temperature gradients are the thing to be watching out for. Water isn't too fast for most things, it is that it is really fast where it is touching the metal, but it too readily creates a vapor barrier that is uneven (some places on a blade will be touching the vapor barrier, others getting the liquid water, and the vapor barrier moves). That is the main point of many of the other quench mediums: get as fast as possible while maintaining even heat transfer. My first few blades were way too thin (I was a freshman in college, I had found Don's original website, but certainly didn't know enough about what I was doing). My burners were not aligned properly, I put my blades right in the hot spots, didn't move them around enough, but I did quench in vegetable oil (but it was room temp). May blades warped like crazy just during the heat up! That was due to the uneven heating. Cooling did it too, but I eventually got lucky with those early blades. I eventually tested them to destruction (never even put handles on them). Anyway, temperature gradients, and especially heating/cooling gradients are the big things to watch out for. If you have normalized properly, any/all stresses before normalizing will be gone. If you find that is not the case, then you aren't normalizing properly. If you normalize properly and still get warps, then it is not from prior stresses, but from stresses after normalizing, most often caused by those pesky thermal gradients.

BTW, I too enjoy chopping firewood. Very satisfying way to work out.

Well, you are on a bladesmithing forum and I know you have the skills so... Copy the size/shape, add some flare (pattern welding, etching, carving, etc.), make your own handle, and have at it! It seems like it wasn't too long ago (maybe a year or so) that there was a thread about a bunch of traditional European (Nordic maybe even) ax shapes. I looked briefly and couldn't find it.

If you can do it, you may want to change the angle that the burner comes in at. If you have it come in at a tangent so the flame swirls around the inside of the forge it tends to help with hot spots, especially reducing the flame hitting directly on the work piece.

After reading the title, I was hoping this was going to be a WIP thread.