I didn't see you made this video! Once again the end product is really nice, especially for a beginner! I suppose i can also give you advice for your next creations. A nut is an odd choice for making a blade, as most are either low carbon or at most medium carbon steel (and rarely martensitic stainless). The sparks from when you were grinding the blade showed it didn't have a lot of carbon at all : the sparks were long, orange, didn't really explode in mid air. The way it forged seemed to also indicate it was quite a soft steel. But it seemed to harden after your quench, except it might not have hardened! Basically, you placed your knife far away from the flame of your forge, and left it to heat up at a yellow heat. The further away from the source of oxygen, the less oxygen and the more carbon monoxide there is in the flame. That means you probably case hardened the outer layer of your steel! Just enough so that when you quenched it, it had a thin layer of hard steel that seemed to make your file skid. But i think after you sanded the blade, you removed most of that hard layer, and you still got a soft blade underneath (now that's not really a crime, during the medieval period, most blades weren't made of hardened steel, and sometimes it was plain iron, so it was soft as hell, but still worked decently. I make blades from hardened bronze, wich isn't much harder than annealed high carbon steel). The other criticism i would have on your quench would be of course the temperature! A yellow heat is WAAAAYYY over the ideal temperature for quenching steel. I mean yeah, your steel is gonna harden, but it's gonna become way more fragile, and no amount of tempering will reverse this. Basically, the hotter you let the steel heat up, the more the crystals in the metal will grow and make grains. You might have seen that fine grains are much stronger than sand-like grains. Now, there are plenty of ways to refine your grains. A common method is letting the grains grow slowly, then cooling. Then making new grains grow inside of the previously made ones, and cooling. And you repeat that 2 or 3 times and the grains become super fine. But the heat to refine the grains should be low, cherry red and not more, perhaps even colder for the last grain refinement cycle (a low red, blood red). An other method i like is squishing the grains to make them split and reform smaller. Basically when you're nearly done forging your blade, at a low heat (aka low orange or even just red), you planish your blade with the hammer, making it nice and flat, while squishing a bit the steel. That refines the grain quite nicely. And so for your final quench, you heat up to cherry red, and you quench. The more you leave it at that temperature/the hotter you make it above cherry red, the more the carbon diffuses into your steel (wich is good, because then you can trap it in your crystals and get hard steel), but also the bigger the grains grow (and when they look like sand, they are like twice more brittle than fine structure, and lowering the hardness trough tempering will NOT make it much less brittle, it's just gonna make it less hard but still pretty fragile). If you don't believe me, you can do an experiment with an old file (you can also do the experiment to understand better your tools, and train your eye to see the temperatures). Stretch the file into a bar, like a square bar, and cut it in 2 pieces that are somewhat long. After forging, put the bars in your forge, and make like 2 or 3 cycles of red heat-> cool down (so basically refining the grain). Take one of the bars, heat up to cherry red once again, quench, cut a thin slot with the angle grinder, and snap it in the vice with eye protections. It should break cleanly where you cut the notch. The grain should be fine like flour, barely visible. (also quenched steel looks light grey compared to untempered steel, so that's an interesting fact). Then, heat up your second bar to a good yellow, let it soak the heat and grow the grains, and then quench. Make the notch, snap it, and you should see grains as big as coarse sand. Also it should snap even easier than the first one. So that's basically how you check if your tempering process is good or not.
These tips are amazing! Thank you so much for taking all of that time to write that out. After cutting the bolt I also found out that it was low carbon steel, but i decided to continue with the project for fun and more practice rather than just quitting. I also won 1st place in a science fair last year for the heat treatment of steel, and i used 1095 high carbon steel blanks instead of old files and did the same exact experiment that you just described. It helped a lot figuring out the right temperatures of steel to achieve the desired hardness like you said. Because this was a softer steel I thought that the hotter i got the steel the harder i could hopefully get it for being a soft steel. But like you said it did create kind of a hard shell around it and the inside was still relatively soft. It was just a fun project all and all and is still functional thankfully. once again thank you so much for your time and your tips help tremendously! If you don’t mind me asking where did you get all of your knowledge from? It was all so in depth and helpful, so i was wondering if it was from a specific book or UA-cam channel. Thanks for watching and such a thoughtful comment!!
@@NolansKnives awesome! 1095 isn't that different from file steel! They usually use either modern alloys with chromium and molybdenum and all kinds of additives to make the steel hard but still tough, but back in the days, steel with 1.3% carbon was quite common (of course making a knife from that isn't really a good idea, like, yeah, you're gonna have maybe 3 or 4 Rockwell C of extra hardness, but you will never have the toughness of a steel with less carbon. Thats also why more carbon doesn't mean better blade, i kinda scratch my head when people make knives from 1095, beacause a 1075 would be nearly as hard (a bit less of course), but at equal hardness, the 1075 will be tougher. Basically for the knowledge, well, i started in my backyard when i was 16 years old, in 2017, and now i'm 22 and i have my own workshop and that's my job now. So it's been more or less 4 years of hobby, and 2 years of a more professional approach. I spend a lot of time online, and after a while when you understand what martensite, pearlite, carbon diffusion, tempering cycles, what all that gibberish means, then you can start reading actual scientific papers on metallurgical studies. I spent 7 months researching how to harden cupro-nickel-aluminum high performance bronze online, i contacted foundries, whoever i could, and i just read pages and pages of reports from engineers who tested new bronze alloys for making planes and such. Well i'm still not sure of what to believe beacause these high performance bronzes are still somewhat experimental, or at least nobody makes blades from them (beacause, as i found out, they are both softer than steel, and more brittle, with the tradeoff of looking like gold. These alloys also forge like shit, it's easier to make damascus than to forge these bronzes.) So yeah, basically reading papers, talking to blacksmiths online, watching blacksmithing videos since i was a kid, stuff like that. But having an experienced guy tell you the stuff makes all the difference. I can tell you "your carbon content is still too low to saturate your solid state solution, and it won't precipitate into Gamma phase martensite after your austenite transitions to alpha phase ferrite", but with the experience and understanding what it means, i can also tell you "there isn't enough carbon in your steel, so even after you dissolved it into your steel at cherry red, it won't get trapped into your crystals to make hard steel after quench, therefore your steel can't be hardened". If you want i made a few videos on my UA-cam channel, i'm french but i dont usually make videos where i speak, i just show (just like you do), so you can watch and understand easily. The name of the channel is "Forge du Lys", if you want to check it out
@@jeanladoire4141hat you were saying about the 1095 steel makes a lot of sense! The reason i chose it was because just starting it was a great steel to begin to understand and it was easily attainable and i was planning on using it a lot in the future. But recently i started forging much more instead of cutting out the shapes from blanks. I also checked out your channel and found tons of useful stuff on it. I love your style of blades and your shop is amazing. Your precision with the hammer is remarkable it was super inspiring to see someone who has turned their passion into a career! I also spend a lot of time researching and watching videos online and they help a lot, but i will have to start looking into more in depth articles like you were saying. Thanks so much for your help and comments!
@@NolansKnives haha no problem, i don't pretend to be an expert, i'm still way too young for that, and i started quite late (tho by the time you're 22, you'll have 10 years of experience already, so pretty much an expert). But yeah, i have a very medieval orientation, so i make knives with burned in tangs, and i forge as finely as possible, i just like it that way, you don't waste material, and it's more historical. But yeah, keep practicing, and you will become really good quickly 👌
@@jeanladoire4141 I think the medieval style is awesome! I would love to try it in the future, and try to make a knife with no grinder just forging and filling. I really appreciate all the advice you’ve given me and will put it all to good use! Thanks again for the comment.
Great work dude 👍👍
Thank you!
He can make a knife out of pretty much anything!
I didn't see you made this video! Once again the end product is really nice, especially for a beginner!
I suppose i can also give you advice for your next creations. A nut is an odd choice for making a blade, as most are either low carbon or at most medium carbon steel (and rarely martensitic stainless). The sparks from when you were grinding the blade showed it didn't have a lot of carbon at all : the sparks were long, orange, didn't really explode in mid air. The way it forged seemed to also indicate it was quite a soft steel. But it seemed to harden after your quench, except it might not have hardened! Basically, you placed your knife far away from the flame of your forge, and left it to heat up at a yellow heat. The further away from the source of oxygen, the less oxygen and the more carbon monoxide there is in the flame. That means you probably case hardened the outer layer of your steel! Just enough so that when you quenched it, it had a thin layer of hard steel that seemed to make your file skid. But i think after you sanded the blade, you removed most of that hard layer, and you still got a soft blade underneath (now that's not really a crime, during the medieval period, most blades weren't made of hardened steel, and sometimes it was plain iron, so it was soft as hell, but still worked decently. I make blades from hardened bronze, wich isn't much harder than annealed high carbon steel).
The other criticism i would have on your quench would be of course the temperature! A yellow heat is WAAAAYYY over the ideal temperature for quenching steel. I mean yeah, your steel is gonna harden, but it's gonna become way more fragile, and no amount of tempering will reverse this. Basically, the hotter you let the steel heat up, the more the crystals in the metal will grow and make grains. You might have seen that fine grains are much stronger than sand-like grains. Now, there are plenty of ways to refine your grains. A common method is letting the grains grow slowly, then cooling. Then making new grains grow inside of the previously made ones, and cooling. And you repeat that 2 or 3 times and the grains become super fine. But the heat to refine the grains should be low, cherry red and not more, perhaps even colder for the last grain refinement cycle (a low red, blood red). An other method i like is squishing the grains to make them split and reform smaller. Basically when you're nearly done forging your blade, at a low heat (aka low orange or even just red), you planish your blade with the hammer, making it nice and flat, while squishing a bit the steel. That refines the grain quite nicely.
And so for your final quench, you heat up to cherry red, and you quench. The more you leave it at that temperature/the hotter you make it above cherry red, the more the carbon diffuses into your steel (wich is good, because then you can trap it in your crystals and get hard steel), but also the bigger the grains grow (and when they look like sand, they are like twice more brittle than fine structure, and lowering the hardness trough tempering will NOT make it much less brittle, it's just gonna make it less hard but still pretty fragile).
If you don't believe me, you can do an experiment with an old file (you can also do the experiment to understand better your tools, and train your eye to see the temperatures). Stretch the file into a bar, like a square bar, and cut it in 2 pieces that are somewhat long. After forging, put the bars in your forge, and make like 2 or 3 cycles of red heat-> cool down (so basically refining the grain). Take one of the bars, heat up to cherry red once again, quench, cut a thin slot with the angle grinder, and snap it in the vice with eye protections. It should break cleanly where you cut the notch. The grain should be fine like flour, barely visible. (also quenched steel looks light grey compared to untempered steel, so that's an interesting fact). Then, heat up your second bar to a good yellow, let it soak the heat and grow the grains, and then quench. Make the notch, snap it, and you should see grains as big as coarse sand. Also it should snap even easier than the first one.
So that's basically how you check if your tempering process is good or not.
These tips are amazing! Thank you so much for taking all of that time to write that out. After cutting the bolt I also found out that it was low carbon steel, but i decided to continue with the project for fun and more practice rather than just quitting. I also won 1st place in a science fair last year for the heat treatment of steel, and i used 1095 high carbon steel blanks instead of old files and did the same exact experiment that you just described. It helped a lot figuring out the right temperatures of steel to achieve the desired hardness like you said. Because this was a softer steel I thought that the hotter i got the steel the harder i could hopefully get it for being a soft steel. But like you said it did create kind of a hard shell around it and the inside was still relatively soft. It was just a fun project all and all and is still functional thankfully. once again thank you so much for your time and your tips help tremendously! If you don’t mind me asking where did you get all of your knowledge from? It was all so in depth and helpful, so i was wondering if it was from a specific book or UA-cam channel. Thanks for watching and such a thoughtful comment!!
@@NolansKnives awesome! 1095 isn't that different from file steel! They usually use either modern alloys with chromium and molybdenum and all kinds of additives to make the steel hard but still tough, but back in the days, steel with 1.3% carbon was quite common (of course making a knife from that isn't really a good idea, like, yeah, you're gonna have maybe 3 or 4 Rockwell C of extra hardness, but you will never have the toughness of a steel with less carbon. Thats also why more carbon doesn't mean better blade, i kinda scratch my head when people make knives from 1095, beacause a 1075 would be nearly as hard (a bit less of course), but at equal hardness, the 1075 will be tougher.
Basically for the knowledge, well, i started in my backyard when i was 16 years old, in 2017, and now i'm 22 and i have my own workshop and that's my job now. So it's been more or less 4 years of hobby, and 2 years of a more professional approach. I spend a lot of time online, and after a while when you understand what martensite, pearlite, carbon diffusion, tempering cycles, what all that gibberish means, then you can start reading actual scientific papers on metallurgical studies. I spent 7 months researching how to harden cupro-nickel-aluminum high performance bronze online, i contacted foundries, whoever i could, and i just read pages and pages of reports from engineers who tested new bronze alloys for making planes and such. Well i'm still not sure of what to believe beacause these high performance bronzes are still somewhat experimental, or at least nobody makes blades from them (beacause, as i found out, they are both softer than steel, and more brittle, with the tradeoff of looking like gold. These alloys also forge like shit, it's easier to make damascus than to forge these bronzes.)
So yeah, basically reading papers, talking to blacksmiths online, watching blacksmithing videos since i was a kid, stuff like that.
But having an experienced guy tell you the stuff makes all the difference. I can tell you "your carbon content is still too low to saturate your solid state solution, and it won't precipitate into Gamma phase martensite after your austenite transitions to alpha phase ferrite", but with the experience and understanding what it means, i can also tell you "there isn't enough carbon in your steel, so even after you dissolved it into your steel at cherry red, it won't get trapped into your crystals to make hard steel after quench, therefore your steel can't be hardened".
If you want i made a few videos on my UA-cam channel, i'm french but i dont usually make videos where i speak, i just show (just like you do), so you can watch and understand easily. The name of the channel is "Forge du Lys", if you want to check it out
@@jeanladoire4141hat you were saying about the 1095 steel makes a lot of sense! The reason i chose it was because just starting it was a great steel to begin to understand and it was easily attainable and i was planning on using it a lot in the future. But recently i started forging much more instead of cutting out the shapes from blanks. I also checked out your channel and found tons of useful stuff on it. I love your style of blades and your shop is amazing. Your precision with the hammer is remarkable it was super inspiring to see someone who has turned their passion into a career! I also spend a lot of time researching and watching videos online and they help a lot, but i will have to start looking into more in depth articles like you were saying. Thanks so much for your help and comments!
@@NolansKnives haha no problem, i don't pretend to be an expert, i'm still way too young for that, and i started quite late (tho by the time you're 22, you'll have 10 years of experience already, so pretty much an expert). But yeah, i have a very medieval orientation, so i make knives with burned in tangs, and i forge as finely as possible, i just like it that way, you don't waste material, and it's more historical.
But yeah, keep practicing, and you will become really good quickly 👌
@@jeanladoire4141 I think the medieval style is awesome! I would love to try it in the future, and try to make a knife with no grinder just forging and filling. I really appreciate all the advice you’ve given me and will put it all to good use! Thanks again for the comment.