This episode on Blondihacks, I’m doing wizard spells! Exclusive videos, drawings, models & plans available on Patreon!
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How do you anneal an air-hardening alloy?
Yes, interested parties want to know.
You have to bring it up to temperature then SLOWLY lower the temperature until the temperature is below a certain point. Usually this is done in a heat-treating oven with a program starting at say 1750F and lowering the temperature say 40F per hour to 1000F then can be taken out to cool to room temp. As always check your references for actual heat-treating info for the exact alloy and supplier you are using.
I use a media to slowly cool the material. I have a 5 gallon bucket of vermiculite for doing this. I also have a chunk of scrap heavy 2" plate that is heated to cherry red. Put the plate in the middle of the vermiculite first to help preheat the vermiculite. Then heat the metal I want to anneal to loss of magnetism and place it in the middle of the vermiculite next to the heavy plate. Then walk away until the next day after it has had time to slowly cool.
You have to cool it slower than just leaving it in air. Depending on the part this can be done by covering it in insulation after heating or maybe you can get away with putting it in the 500 degree toaster oven after heating. The bottom line is that you have to slow the cooling rate enough to allow enough time so the softer microstructures form rather than the super hard ones.
I’ll pin this thread since many are asking and you all covered the topic well. 😄
Old gunsmith technique is to clamp a piece of scrap angle iron extending out the side of you vice to form a cradle and place small parts on it and play the flame under the scrap angle, but not directly under the part. The heat will slowly creep under the part and you can observe its color without looking directly at the flame or through the flame. When it gets to the desired color nudge the part off the scrap angle into a waiting cup of water. It slows things down and gives you great control over the process.
So a similar technique to when silver soldering, where you also want to heat the more massive part(s) and let small parts and the solder seam heat indirectly from that. Clever, that.
Brilliant! I see the reply from @autochton, and a similar process can be used to solder PCB (computer) boards, especially when doing the super tiny surface mount stuff, by using a bit of aluminum plate. Comments like yours are why I love this chan, ToT and AvE. Best comments on the interwebs!
Quinn - great job of covering the basics in detail, without overcomplicating the subject.
This is one of her greatest skills, to explain without confusing. Not easy to do.
One of the finest qualities in a teacher.
Things are about to get real heated!
The temperature is really rising here in the comment section!
Well, it is a hot topic
Treat yourself to this hot info
6:47 - blacksmithing tip: a good way to know if you are hot enough is to use a magnet. When you get to the critical temperature the steel becomes nonmagnetic.
This is a very good method for checking that the correct hardening temperature has been achieved. Best to use a ceramic magnet from a loudspeaker or microwave oven. Keep in mind this method is applicable to the common high carbon tool steels such as W-1, O-1, A-2, etc. For high alloy tool steels a thermocouple type of measurement instrument is advantageous.
Also helpful for those of us who are colourblind. All those shaded of red/orange look the same to me.
@@pileofstuff Many years ago some testing was done to check on the accuracy of "temperature by eye" determination. It turned out that with highly experienced workers a given worker had a variance of over 50 deg F., which is not acceptable for accurate work. For a home work shop using common high carbon steel the magnet method is fine. Complex tool steel alloys require thermocouple instruments for heat treatment.
GREAT refresher for me . Thanks, Quinn
That is the best use for canola oil ever!
Quinn, great job on making heat treating approachable to your audience. I work in a "big boy" tool and die shop now but 15 years ago this video would have been mind blowing to me. Hopefully this will open doors for your followers. I find great information on Crucible and Carpenter tool steel's websites.
I'm currently a tool and die apprentice and and metallurgy is probably about a 1/4 of everything I'm being taught
Great video, this reminded me of a time in my life many decades ago. When I first got out of high school I got a job at the city works. One of the positions I had was part time equipment operator (jackhammer) and assistant to the blacksmith. The black smith shop was a dimly lit space with a century of dirt, soot and tools every where. The man working as the blacksmith was a welder really and not a blacksmith. He used to sharpen the jackhammer bits which he would heat in the forge and hammer out a new tip on them, then quench them in oil to harden them. He got the bits to a specific colour the quench them. One day he got the city to replace all the old dim lights with new much brighter florescent tube lights. Every bit he sharpened under those lights the tip shattered the very first time they were used. The bits were too hot when he quenched them, his colour perception had changed under the new lights.
Reminds me of the story told by gun nerds about - I had to look this up - the M1903 Springfield rifles. For the first many years of production, the machinists would judge heat treatment temperatures by eye ... and the difference of ambient light levels between a sunny day and a cloudy one could throw off their judgment of temperature by a quite significant amount. Fortunately, the process Quinn is describing is significantly less fussy than that one.
Metallurgy has come along way. @@Packbat
Or if you have a hardened thing stuck in a hole like a broken tap, you can often anneal it with the torch and drill the centre. The teeth will still be hard due to their engagement in the material, but you should be able to soften the core enough to drill it out
The factory that made Mapp blew up. I have a couple of really old bottles that are legitimate Mapp that I only use for special occasions. 😂
A perfect illustration of why parting off can be so fraught. The tool post is deflecting forwards under the cutting load, which increases the depth of cut and therefore the load. It's a positive feedback loop and can lead to chatter, or a dig in. Generally, more rigidity is better and locking the top slide when parting can help, but these small lathes are never very rigid. Old big lathes didn't used to be all that rigid either and the spring toolholder was invented to help. It changes the geometry, so that when the toolholder flexes, the tool tip moves down and decreases the depth of cut. The other way of doing this is to run the parting blade upside-down and part off in reverse.
Never tried the reverse method, I'll have remember that. I always did all my parting by hand feeding and sweating bullets, and even with the barest minimum of tool over hang you'd still get sudden grabs that really get your heart racing.
Yep, I do almost all of my parting on a C2 lathe upside down and backwards. I started doing it before I knew the details of why it worked, I just noticed in forward it took the lash out of the system and if the feed wasn't right the tool post/compound would start bouncing. But upside down and reverse, it took the lash out without "springing" the post/compound leading to way better results.
9:12 - in old blacksmithing books that is how they would determine if a steel was tool steel. You would break it like that and take a look at the grain structure. Tool steel like that will have a very fine grain. Contrast that with cast iron, when you smash it, it looks like coarse sand
Give or take -- there are a lot of kinds of steels and irons, of course! The thing with cast iron is it contains flecks of graphite, which are both quite dark (hence the name), and act like sharp voids in the metal matrix itself -- stress raisers that sap all ductility from it, not to mention weakening it. (That said, there are some fairly strong grades of gray iron.) Thin parts like that will have fine grain structure, and you might mistake the graphite flakes for iron crystals; a microscope will help tell the story. Big blocky parts will have coarse grain structure, enough that you can see the salt-and-pepper texture by eye. Ductile iron might also be easy to confuse, because the graphite is present not as flakes but spheroids; it will be darker than steel, but much lighter than gray iron. There's also white cast iron, the high-carbon equivalent of quench hardening. But as the name suggests, it gives a shiny fracture. ("Cast iron" is, more or less, any iron alloy with enough carbon that it can precipitate (as graphite), if cooled slowly enough, or at faster cooling rates with help from added silicon. Cooled too quickly, graphite doesn't have time to form and carbides result, hence the extreme hardness and brittleness.)
I was the QC manager for a 7-acre precision machining shop, and we did our own heat treating. Your primer is as good as it gets on YT. I can't tell you how many times I've muttered under my breath at youtubers "Swish it! Noooo, don't pull it out while it's still red hot!" They don't understand that the object is to keep it hot, dunk it fast, and cool it as quickly as possible. Good job!
I’ve spent hours the last couple of days searching videos and forums on heat treating tool steel and your video shows up. You just saved me a pile of dough Quinn! Thanks for all you do for the machining hobby community.
An important note when heat treating by eye: The room lighting must be consistent. During early production of the American M1903 rifle the heat treating furnaces didn't have pyrometers. The process was controlled by eye. The area was lit by natural sunlight. On a cloudy day the light would be different. There were multiple receiver failures.
For the most part true. The improved process on heat treat did allow the O3 to be even stronger. The lots you speak of failed when case pressures got to around 70K PSI, the improved process moved that to more like 100K. But the bigger problem was the ammunition of the period, there were a couple of bad lots and from what P. O. Ackley and others found, the failures all involved that ammo.
Not only do I learn a lot from your videos I also love your sense of humor . Thank you for taking the time to share.
Her sense of humor is well tempered.
Thank you for another no-nonsense tutorial on how to implement processes and techniques without relying on expensive equipment. The focus on "home gamer" ways of making do elevates your videos' usefulness and appeal significantly.
Few things are as gratifying as a torch heat treatment that goes successfully. 1 part knowledge. 1 park artistry. 2 parts magic. I always love using home made tools that I machined and heat treated. You did a great cover on what is need to get started and be successful. Anyone wanting to take the plunge has more than enough knowledge with this to get going.
Having spent a little while as a teaching assistant for a college class on heat transfer, that point you make about the inertia of heat is *so* important. Spending time in a lab with temperature probes, I was amazed at how long it would take to get to a steady temperature.
Excellent camera work through the scope.
Thank you for appreciating that. It was very difficult but the topic required it 😄
Probably one of the best heat treating vids around. No hype, just pure technique. Nice one Quinn.
Quinn, thanks for this video! Absolutely clearest concise explanation of basic steel heat-treating I’ve ever seen! I trained and earned a degree to teach high school industrial arts in the 70’s. Have seen various how-to’s and much more technical explanations of heat-treating, but yours is the best! I tried doing classroom demos of a large part of what you did but I’m sure when I turned the lights back on, many of my students were still in the dark. Again, thank you!
Old toolmaker here. Everything was spot on.
If parting off is a nightmare, as it is on my little lathe, try a sprung Armstrong type tool. Winky did a nice video on this type of tool so I made one and it works very well. In essence, the tool moves away from the workpiece rather than digging in, it chatters at the first cut until it finds it's medium and then cuts cleanly. Or use a rear toolpost with the parting blade mounted upside down, if you have space on your cross slide.
Hi Quinn, what many people don't know is the (matensite) carbon growth is forming for a few minutes after quench, this means you have a short window to do a little straitening. many knife makers take advantage of this window. also after the material is drawn back to say 59RC my happy number you can subzero quench (dry ice or liquid nitrogen) it will typically gain 3 - 5 points of Rockwell C finishing the rest of carbon structure to complete it's growth and with many benefits
This kind of fantastic, educational video is one of the main reasons I live your channel. Always so clear and concise, and often with demonstrations!
Wonderful presentation! For anyone interested in doing this for sheet metal, say for armor for Western martial arts or sport fighting, we had tremendous success with SAE 1050 steel, a water hardening kind that we drew (tempered) to around purple/blue (call it 600-650 F). Be sure to experiment, toughness is far more important than hardness in this application, but any hardening reduces damage from use considerably. SAE 1045 is also quite useful (containing 45 points of carbon instead of 50), but 1015 will not harden and 1065 is probably going to harden too much. Just more in the rather infinite amount of information on heat treatment. No matter what you're doing, have fun, and wear your PPE.
Super accessible breakdown of the process, I really like that you showed lower cost/lower stress methods of testing and heating. Awesome content as always.
The parting tool shenanigans reminds me of an excellent project for the small lathe shop, Winky's Workshop has drawings for a flexible or compliant parting blade holder. it's still very rigid, but has just enough give so that if the parting blade catches, it can deflect enough to get itself out rather than transmit the force all the way into your compound. If you're having problems with parting chatter or parting in general, a flexible parting blade on a solid tool post mount can buy a lot of ease for a small lathe.
14:38 - you can also directionally quench as well. I recall reading in a blacksmithing book how for a hammer you want the center of the face to be glass hard, but you want softer edges of the face so it doesn't chip. To do this you take a can and poke a hole in it. When you go to quench you use this can with the hole in it to direct a stream of water to the center of the face. Since that takes the most cooling it gets the hardest while the edges of the face don't and stay softer
Ring tempering is a better way to do a hammer.
Love the content! please keep showing us the missteps, it helps keep me humble, and thus safe.
Oh man. I *love* heat treating. It's so easy and satisfying! I needed to make specialized forming punches to re-create the fancy washers used on old straight razors and I managed to do the heat treat just right on O1 drill rod with no difficulty on the first try. And the second! Even the third! I did use the convection toaster oven for tempering though, and just looked up the temperature to set the oven to for the hardness I wanted. But it was all dead simple and worked great. Watching this video has made me want to go downstairs and make some parts to treat!
That is probably the best description on how to harden and temper steel.
As many others have said another very well done breakdown of this process! Awesome content as always Quinn! Thanks again!
I mostly do my tempering in oil, in an electric wok. I usually allow 1hr per 1" of thickness.
The "change my shorts" comment caught me off guard. I was laughing like a ninny. Thanks Quinn 😂
Thank you for all this information!!
Excellent video. Thanks for taking the time to make it
Love your tips and tricks for doing your own work at home.
For those who want to go a little deeper into the subject without getting into textbook-level detail, Book 1 in the Workshop Practice Series is a good source.
Great content today. Very well explained. Thanks for what you do.
Superb! Thanks for uploading.
This is gold! Saved! Will be watching this several times.
That was one of your best video's ever, thank you
Great demonstration, great lesson!
Great presentation . Practical .
Excellent explanation!
Quinn - you’re a fantastic teacher. Thanks for demystifying this.
Really excellent video that clears up a lot of the myths and mysteries in this area. Thank you so much for all of the excellent content!
Such a great video, awesome work ! 👍🏼👌🏻
Thanks Quinn, helps a lot
Very good instructions as usual. I love watching the colors travel. I have made a few tools and a couple of blades and so far, no exploding knives. That's a good thing. Thanks, and Meow to Sprocket.
Great discussion / demonstration
Great demo, Quinn!!
Excellent video lesson, well done you! Gong to try this in my shop.
Nice job on explaining this subject 😊 thanks
Excellent introduction to metallurgy.
I have been looking for this video for a long time. Excellent! Thank you.
I've always appreciated your 'temperament' in your presentation.
Hey Quinn , thank you for taking some of the mystery out of the heat treating prosses.
Brilliant vid. I love stuff like this made understandable. Thanks
Thanks so much for a simplified and very informative demonstration of this process Quinn. Love this.
Great refresher for me! I first learned this in '87 when I was in farrier's school where we learned to do it in a forge. We used it for hardening pritchels (punches) that are used for punching horse shoe nail holes.
Great job Quinn
Fascinating, surprisingly simple!! Thanks...
Very much many a lot of thanks for this lesson, it took together all the little knowledge which I already acquired.
Thanks for the video on the subject. As you pointed out, these are high carbon steels. The softer steels can also be hardened as you know by the process of case hardening. They can also be made real purdy thata way. Many an old gun frame, such as the ones on the Colt Single Action Army are color case hardened. So if you ever want to run a video on those methods, it could be fun.
Aestheticaly the straw and deep blue are amazing colors.
This has to be the quickest and best video on this subject i have ever seen. Great work ❤
Just great content. I was amazed at how you did explained this. thank you so much Quinn,
That was awesomely informative. Thank You!
Excellent. This is a keeper vid. Thank you for making this easy.
Very good information. Thank You for sharing Best Wishes to You and Your Family for the Holiday Season.
Awesome video, Quinn! Really good info on hardening and tempering. As you said, this is one of those scary things you run into early on when working in machining, but your discussion of it here really helps demystify the process and make it very clear. Excellent video, thank you!
Now even I get it. Tried it and it worked. Thanks! 🙃
Wishing you and your family a Very Merry Christmas!!!
foreshadowing more learning... again thank you
Thank you sooooo much for clarifying this technique and making it clear: I've always thought that it would be beyond me.
Thanks! Very informative.
This was a hard one. Thank you!
Thanks for this great video. It contained everything I always wanted to know about hardening, enhanced with your nice sense of humor.
Thank you for another great video Quinn! You are an amazing teacher, and I continue to learn interesting things from your videos. Thank you for making them.
awesome instructional vid! thank you!
Awesome explanation! Thanks!
Excellent video Quinn, that puts it all together for the younger crowd.😊
Great advice 😊 thank you for sharing
Thanks, just what I needed
Right to the point. Thank you 👍
Good work quinn # that was a good honest no bs refresher course . Bit envious of your hardness tester 😊 # so thanx again for your help thru the year and wish you a merry xmas and happy new year. ❤
Excellent info. Thank you.
You're a great teacher.
Thanks for reminder! I knew all of that in theory, but not having done any hardening or annealing for ages, a repeat course was definitely in place - just in case I after all need to do it.
Thank you! You are a natural teacher, effortlessly informing and encouraging and inspiring! I love your videos! -thank you for all your efforts. Happy holidays!
Went to school for jewelry, this is a great video. Easy and correct information. Thank you. Also really like you harness tester.
thanks! For part 2 please discuss warping as a side effect and how to minimize it.
Biggest thing to remember to avoid warping as much as possible on a long tool is to make the quenching as even as possible. On a long piece do not enter quench with the part held vertical. Have the length enter horizontal so both ends and the middle enter at the same time. Then once in the quench keep the prat moving. If you hold it static air bubbles can form on the part from the heat. These bubbles will slow the quench and cause incomplete hardening.
A lot of awesome information...thank you very much!
Great video. Thanks, looking forward to seeing the completed engine and tender. Dee in Alabama
Brilliant video you made that really clear 😀
This was an extraordinary useful tutorial. I've seen this done, and even seen you do this in your videos, but I never connected all the dots before like what you did in this tutorial for me. (As you know I'm a not a machinist, thinking one day of entering the hobby) Regardless if I use this knowledge for a project or not, I still like to learn things and be educated. Thank you so much!
you are the absolute best at machining for dummies or self taught machinists... always straight forward with the proper visuals the whole way thank you!
A really good teaching video. Thank you. This is the exact same thing I was taught in the 70’s in school metalwork class.