Jerrod Miller

Ute is short for Utility. Kind of like SUV = Sport Utility Vehicle. Utility vehicles are a bit more broad than pick ups, and are generally anything with a bed. I love the shot of it just barely fitting in the forge. What that a bit of a limiting factor, or did you want it that size anyway? Love it.

The solid chunk is the important part. You said you were thinking of adding a 2" hard cap, which to me sounds like a 2" thick piece of hardened steel, which is nothing like hard facing.

In general, welding things together isn't ideal for an anvil.

I wouldn't recommend it. You will get a lot of vibration between the plates, even when using the 5" width. I'd keep looking for a better option. Wouldn't be the worst thing in the world either though.

Keeping in mind that I don't do canister damascus, so this is pretty much just "arm-chair blacksmithing", I think any non-metallic barrier is going to work. So it depends on what the other 84% is and how well it all stays between the can and the good stuff.

We can always assume the sugar is important since it will provide a reducing atmosphere and coat the surfaces with carbon, both things that will help with a forge weld. I worked at a foundry once that would though a handful of sugar packets on top of the poured investment molds before putting a 55 gallon drum over it. The reducing atmosphere prevented pin-hole defects. I asked "why sugar packets?" and was told that they were cheap, easy, and readily available. Totally not related story, but it cracks me up every time I think about it. When I was fresh out of coll

Unlike the Leeb tests, the CPT and Ames will both give a true hardness reading. I would question the accuracy a little bit due to the potential influence of the operator. With a bit of practice on a sample of known hardness to get repeatable (accurate) numbers, then I think you should be good to go. In principle at least. I have no experience with these units so cannot speak to their quality of build or anything. I see that Sun-Tec, the company I use at work for re-building and calibrating our portable Brinell testers, offers the CPT for sale, as well as sells refurbished equipment. They

You need to do both. There is a lot of heat treating info in the Heat Treating By Alloy subforum. You need to know what alloy you are starting with for optimal results and specific temps and techniques. But in general here is the process: Forge to shape Normalize at least once, 2-3 times is better Do major grinding/profiling Normalize again, enough times to get 3-5 total cycles since forging Heat to critical (watch for recalescence and decalescence as needed - this is the hot cycle you've seen) Quench in appropriate medium (oil or water, most often oil)

Personally I don't think I would worry about it. If you really wanted to be sure you had no problems, a quick coating of graphite spray would be cheap and easy. You certainly won't get appreciable carbon pickup (carburization), and it would act as a sacrificial layer to protect from oxidizing. Also, if you just burry the blade in sand while at temp that will reduce exposure to atmosphere and thus reduce decarb chances. ETA: Heh, Alan and I posted at the same time.

Also, smelting is converting ore to metal. You'll get better results when searching if you use the proper terms. You are looking to just melt and cast (even if just casting ingots). Given your location is Germany, this may be a simple translation issue, but you can clearly communicate well enough in English that I assume you are happy to look through English language sources.

What Alan said. The reason for this is that tempering is a longer process and the clay won't stop the heat from getting through for a significant amount of time. When using clay in a quench you get things to slow down by a second or so.

Given the generally short exposure at lower temps, I wouldn't worry about it too much, just from a potential diffusion standpoint.

To answer your original question: If the rigidizer is sodium silicate (aka water glass), as I think is most often the case, then the primary means of curing are exposure to a weak acid (most often CO2) or heat it to drive the moisture out (about 250F for a couple hours). If you apply it and let it sit for a while it will eventually grab enough CO2 from the air, while simultaneously losing the water to the air, and will thus harden. But then again, it is pretty much just another silica source (silicate!) and much more likely to lead to particles of the appropriate size to ca

The eutectoid point is where the A1/A2, A3, and ACM lines meet (the valley where austenite formation happens the coldest). Depending on the phase diagram you're looking at, that could be about 0.76% to about 0.84% (hence why 1080 and1084 are made and are basically the same thing). The thing to keep in mind is that the Fe-C phase diagram attempts to consider only Fe and C. Other elements will push A1/A2, A3, and ACM around a bit, so the eutectoid point moves. From there, 'hypo' means below and 'hyper' means above/beyond. Also, eutectic is is similar except it isn't with the au

You'll probably get good tips here, but you may get better responses to this in the Design and Critique sub-forum. An admin may move it there. Others have a much better eye for these things than me, but I think a choil notch or something changed in that area would look better. Certainly listen to others more than me on style things though.