My initial journey into crucible steels.

[Joshua States]

13 hours ago, Daniel Cauble said:

Seems people missed my orishigane thread too.

Don't take it personally. There's too much good stuff here and only a limited amount of time.......poor excuse, I know, but it's the only one I can come up with at the moment. Now I'm off to find that Orishigane thread.

[Daniel Cauble]

My most recent work. ~1.7% C

 

[Wesley Alberson]

I've been following your work on instagram. This is really cool! How are you able to control the heat so you don't accidentally burn the billet?

[Alan Longmire]

Nice!  Made any blades from it yet?

[Daniel Cauble]

4 hours ago, Alan Longmire said:

Nice!  Made any blades from it yet?

Not yet. A medical procedure this weekend stopped me from working further.

[Daniel Cauble]

On 11/3/2018 at 7:33 PM, Wesley Alberson said:

I've been following your work on instagram. This is really cool! How are you able to control the heat so you don't accidentally burn the billet?

I use a thermocouple an keep everything exact.

[Daniel Cauble]

Ive made 2 blades. One broke while straightening.

Different viewing angles...

 

And the broken one...

 

On 11/4/2018 at 7:29 AM, Alan Longmire said:

Nice!  Made any blades from it yet?

Not too bad, are they Alan? Ive got one more Gyuto to forge from this steel to go.

[AndrewB]

That pattern is nice what rotten luck one broke.

[Alan Longmire]

DAYYUM that's some nice watering!  Too bad about the break. 

[Joshua States]

Niiiiice Daniel!  beautiful watering.  Is there enough blade left on that broken one to make a small herb chopper?

[Daniel Cauble]

Oh yea. Plenty for that. Planned on it actually.

It was a happy accident. Shortly after these were made, i was approached by a student at a lab in Canada who wanted to write up a report on the strength of interdendritic regions to the overall blade. I and 2 other people from different areas of the world sent samples of material to be looked at through an SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope), regular metallurgical optical scopes, and a mass spectrometer. I typically cut windows from each crucible puck, which was another happy coincidence because i was able to send one set pf samples that contained a chunk from the puck, a piece of the bar after spheroidizing, and a piece of a blade from that bar.

Another bag contained a previous run where from my understanding of what was going on, crossed the 2% C threshold. I sent a sample of the puck and thr bar i forged following. 

I even sent folded samples of my orishigane. I felt it was relavent since that is what i use as feed material for my.crucibles to begin with. The really cool thing there will be finding out carbom content in a 4 fold and 9 fold sample. It will give me a good idea on how well i retain carbon on my process. It will also show me if my findings all this time are true or not in relation to removing Mn from steel in the hearth process. I suspect it does. All of my hearth steel and even this crucible steel reveal to me that despite the original steel to be melted at the very beginning (the hearth) having .8% Mn, that the hearth seperates it in the slag/silica. I have never made a deep hardening sample of orishigane to date.

 

A full report will be written and submitted to me in January.

[Alan Longmire]

That's pretty awesome, Daniel.  

[JASON VOLKERT]

Holy Smokes that is some interesting stuff. Thank you for sharing

[SteveShimanek]

Epic thread, even my wife likes your crucible steel! Your results are impressive.

[Joshua States]

Wow. I hope you can share the report findings when you get it. 

I love the whole iron smelting, bloomery  and crucible steel making going on in the blade-smithing arena.  Thanks for sharing.

[Daniel Cauble]

Thanks guys, np. This year my focus is going back to my orishigane and making japanese swords, so after the last chef knife with this puck I will put crucible steels on hold.

[Jan Ysselstein]

Experimenting with crucible steel is very time consuming and expensive...progress tends to be slow...I totally understand your thinking.

Jan

[Tim Mitchell]

That is a very interesting pattern that you show there in your blades Daniel.  It is a pain to have one break on you though.  There are few reasons why it could have broken, unless you get the structure just right the steel can break if you bend it too much, or harden it severely.  Taking warps out of it is generally done with a thick heated copper block placed on the concave side of the warp or bend.  Flexing the blade hard before tempering it isn't the best thing with a high carbon steel like wootz.

By the way, your pattern there looks like it is a combination of grain boundary cementite over dendritic sub-structure which you have then stretched and deformed due to forging processes. It is unusual, but I suspect that you let it set at just a high enough heat for a bit too long so that the grains grew large and some cementite gravitated to the grain boundaries but not all of it.  Forging then at a significantly lower temperature after that preserved both your grain boundary pattern and your coarse dendritic pattern.  As I said it is very unusual to see both combined, it is mostly one or the other, but that may have something to do with your steel chemistry.

It is good to see you still experimenting but understand you wanting to take a break from ingots for awhile.  It is much easier to control your ingots and pattern if you know the chemistry of what you are putting into the ingots. Being consistent across all your ingots is the key to perfecting your forging technique and patterning.

I am sure you will come back to the "Utsa" Crucible steel has a way of dragging you back.

Edited April 4, 2019 by Tim Mitchell

[Daniel Cauble]

On 4/4/2019 at 5:10 AM, Tim Mitchell said:

That is a very interesting pattern that you show there in your blades Daniel.  It is a pain to have one break on you though.  There are few reasons why it could have broken, unless you get the structure just right the steel can break if you bend it too much, or harden it severely.  Taking warps out of it is generally done with a thick heated copper block placed on the concave side of the warp or bend.  Flexing the blade hard before tempering it isn't the best thing with a high carbon steel like wootz.

By the way, your pattern there looks like it is a combination of grain boundary cementite over dendritic sub-structure which you have then stretched and deformed due to forging processes. It is unusual, but I suspect that you let it set at just a high enough heat for a bit too long so that the grains grew large and some cementite gravitated to the grain boundaries but not all of it.  Forging then at a significantly lower temperature after that preserved both your grain boundary pattern and your coarse dendritic pattern.  As I said it is very unusual to see both combined, it is mostly one or the other, but that may have something to do with your steel chemistry.

It is good to see you still experimenting but understand you wanting to take a break from ingots for awhile.  It is much easier to control your ingots and pattern if you know the chemistry of what you are putting into the ingots. Being consistent across all your ingots is the key to perfecting your forging technique and patterning.

I am sure you will come back to the "Utsa" Crucible steel has a way of dragging you back.

That is very disappointing to me if this is the case Tim.

 

Makes me want to begin cycling this one.

[Jokke]

Nice to see you work on the pucks here! Sorry but I was not active here for quite some time, on one of the bext weekends I will be making more pucks with my friend Johannes. We will aim to 1,6% and above. It is always very urgent to normalize the wootz inbetween cycles of forging. In my eyes the necessary manipulation of the surface to achieve a decent "look" is underestimated.

Best regards,

Jokke

[Daniel Cauble]

That last blade showed an analysis in the end:

C: 1.58% (The chunk I cut off the original puck started at 1.64%)

Si: .051%

Mn: <.001% ( )

P: .05%

S: .01%

Cr: .019%

Ni: .130%

Mo: .006%

Cu: .101%

Co: .020%

V: .0042%

W: .007%

N: >.012

 

 

Edited April 5, 2019 by Daniel Cauble

[Joël Mercier]

Is it a typo or there is really 0.13% nitrogen?

[Daniel Cauble]

3 minutes ago, Joël Mercier said:

Is it a typo or there is really 0.13% nitrogen?

Lol thanks. Ni.

[Joël Mercier]

With such a low amount of manganese, is water quenching a must or stuff like parks50 does the trick?

[Daniel Cauble]

Water quenching would be ideal if I werent so scared of breaking. It offers the same challenge heat treating as it does in the form of the parent feedstock going in the crucible. My Mn defficient orishigane.

 

I had to grind that thinner than I liked and quenched in Parks 50 and still had the auto-hamon you see in the last pics.