Hi, I'm Chris and I make knives. In today's video we're heat treating blade steel
The Fallen Star Knife - Chapter 7
Welcome to my workbench. These six blades go with the six fallen star I'm bringing to the blade show.
What I'm about to do now is I'm going to heat treat these blades
This steel that I use is CTS-XHP. It is a stainless tool steel.
And before you heat treat them, they are more susceptible to rust.
To prevent that I coat the blades in WD-40
So the first thing I need to do is I'm gonna clean these blades in the ultrasonic cleaner. Followed by a wipe down with acetone.
Just some quick tips
When you're storing your blades, it's best if you can store them without stacking them on top of each other.
That's bad. You want to keep the blades separate?
Ideally, you would have them in some container where nothing's touching
So I've cleaned my blades and now I need to make my pouches
This is 309 a heat treating foil some people call a tool wrap.
it's .020 thick. It's good up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit
And what we're going to do now is, were going to make some little pouches to put the blades in.
I pulled nine inches off the Roll I cut that. And then I can cut those into eight inch pieces.
So I have a square here..that's... it's not square. It's nine inches by eight
What I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna put the blade in the center of this and then fold it onto itself
Make a nice little pouch.
You want to be real careful when you handle this foil the edges of it's very sharp
It can cut you just like a knife.
I did double crimp these edges.
So I told you this foil was sharp.
I don't know where or how it got me but I'm starting to see blood on
My foil, and on my hands, and stuff on my tooling plate
So what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna go wash my hands real quick; find the cut, put a bandaid on it
What we're going to do next is we're gonna put argon gas in this foil.
I double crimped the edges.
And now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go put argon gas inside my little pouch.
The specific weight of argon is 1.38 It's heavier than air.
So when you put the argon gas in there treat it like a glass of water, and don't spill it any.
Then reseal it quickly and you'll have an inert atmosphere inside this foil pouch.
So once you pour that in there you want to treat it like water
So here's my five blades, you say well Chris you started with six, where is it? That's a great question...
I don't know. I dropped it in the floor. It totally disappeared. I've been looking for it for the last hour
If I find it, I'm going to heat treat it
But I really can't afford to spend a whole lot of time looking for it
It's a great mystery. You drop something in the floor; it disappears. Where does it go? I don't know.
What I have here
These are just old blade steel that I have surface ground down to the exact thickness of my knife.
What I'm using is called a plate quench. This is just an inch thick 6061 aluminum plates
Very simply...
I'm a take the blade steel out, put it down, and then put the plate quench on top of it and my spacers.
My spacers will prevent it from rocking.
You can see that the kiln is crazy hot. It's 1875 degrees fahrenheit. So you want to wear some PPE
Welding gloves would probably be better.
Get you a pair of channel locks, tongs, something like that.
If you need more time, just push the add time button.
"V-wah-Lah" I you just added five minutes
I'm gonna start taking these out now
Be very careful when you set them down at this time, it's very easy...
To bow the tip of your blade.
And these quench plates, prevent the blade from bowing
So we'll watch my temperature here come back up to 1875 before I pull out the next blade
HOT! HOT! HOT! HOT!
This is now cool to where you can handle it.
See okay, am I blocking the view?
So everyone cut these open and see how we did.
Just so you know, I did find my sixth blade and I heat-treated that too.
Be careful this foil, don't cut ya.
Little bit of carbonization where we didn't have enough argon
So now what we're going to do... is move to the surface plate and check to make sure it's flat
Welcome to the surface plate.
We're now gonna check the blade to make sure that it's flat.
And it is flat.
Take a feeler gauge
Try to push underneath there feeler gauge won't go
So this blade is flat. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to
Temper it we're gonna temper it at a lower temperature
Try to put them in the middle and you're doing your tempering. You don't need the foil
So we're coming up on the end of the first temper
What I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna pull these out and let them air cool to room temperature
That'll take about 15 minutes. And then we're gonna put them back inside the kiln and again take them to 400 degrees Fahrenheit
Hold that for one hour. Some guys do a cryogenics between the two tempers. I don't do that
I'm able to get 62C on the Rockwell hardness
With what I have in house, without having to deal with dry ice or liquid nitrogen
any of that nasty stuff, that's one of the reasons why I really like
CTS-XHP (Carpenter's XHP)
*Kiln Beeping*
It's been 20 minutes these have now cooled down to room temperature, we'll put them back inside the kiln
Watch out for the kiln, it's still hot.
And now what I'm going is test a rockwell hardness c
To see where I'm at
And I want to test it up here near the stop pin
So that it doesn't interfere with the track of my detent ball
If you guys can see I try to hold the camera still
And it looks like I've got
Almost 62 it looks like 61.5
and I do have calibration plates
So I'm happy with that
and if you guys
If you guys see this little divot right here near my thumb.
Near the stop pin...
That's from the hardness test. Some guys will do three and take an average of all three. I just do one
Yeah, so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna remove all this scale
By Bead Blasting it off there.
And I'm also going to lap the pivot to remove any scale that might have fell inside the pivot hole.
Welcome to my drill press.
This is a barrel lap.
It's just a .250 inch barrel lap
What I'm gonna do now, is I'm going to use this diamond lapping paste, and lap the inside of my pivot hole.
Sometimes after the heat treat, scale builds up inside the pivot hole. This is how I'm going to remove it.
Using the drill press
This is just a stud to prevent the blades from pinwheeling.
Something that I threaded and tapped to help protect my fingers I
Hope you can hear me. Okay. I'm actually machining some pocket clips
And I'll show you that in a future video
So what I have here, this is my blade and this is my pivot.
Now the pivot will not go into the blade and what's happened is after heat-treat scale has built up inside this pivot hole.
And so I'm going to remove it using this barrel lap
So you want to set this up so that...
First of all, you have to know... that you have no run-out.
You've got to know your TIR (Total Indicated Run-out) for your barrel lap.
Because if you're not careful at this time, you could hurt the knife.
You want this to be completely ninety degrees to your spindle.
and you don't want any run-out at all on your Drill press.
So make sure...
a lot of drill presses will have run out.
You want to be sure; to check that... to make sure that it's accurate.
Choose your drill press very carefully.
It's a Class Z Accuracy.
It's accurate to within .00025 of an inch
.250 will not go and
The .249 (one thousandths) smaller is too small.
And so what I've been doing, is I've just been press fitting.
To get a feel when I do the barrel lap.
I actually used the pivot.
And this is kind of what I'm looking for.
My question to you guys; if there's anyone out there that can answer this is...
How do you accurately measure your holes in a small shop?
To the ten thousandths of an inch
This is a Z set pin gauge
Which I think is accurate to within...
and so that's only accurate to within .00025 of an inch
I'd like to be able to measure this.
Beyond just you know fitting.
So if anybody could answer to me how I can accurately measure that without like, you know a TMM machine or a laser?
Or something crazy expensive.
I'm I'd like to know if you can answer that question for me
We're going to bead blast finishing the blade
* Bead Blasting Finishing *
Just so you guys can see what I've done. I used a blast cabinet to remove on the scale from the knife and
it's a great way to get down inside all your jimping, especially the tiny jimpping and engraving.
So I've removed all the scale from the knife, and I've also lapped the pivot.
This knife is ready for the next process. I think I'm gonna grind a lock on the back of the blade.
I'm gonna show you guys that in a future video
Please subscribe, stay tuned, and thanks for watching.
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