This probably isn’t going to generate that much interest or much you can do anything with, but work is busy, something I may have said three times in the last several months, and though I’ve made a fair amount of stuff this year, none of it was large and consuming, and when I’m not in the shop for a week, I get really annoyed. I fought when I was younger to figure out what to do that would be motivating enough to keep me in the shop as I was following the gurus and assuming it would become spontaneously interesting, but it didn’t.
Ghee, another issue of fine woodworking and popular woodworking goes by. Ghee, I still feel when reading the articles that I either wasn’t interested in the topic, or if it was yet another article by the Schwarz, that there was some role playing underlying the whole concept. “Old tyme” spelling of something or too campy or whatever.
Eventually, if you waste enough time, you figure out what you want. I have no shortage of things I want to make now or make better, but some of that is built on comfort knowing that certain elements will come out.
It’s not at all obvious what this is. it’s a hand tapered iron that came out of heat treat and rested so I could snag a hardness reading off of it. 1.25% carbon steel, quenched in brine, and of course it warped a little – it’s water hardening. But it’s warp in the range of hand removal and before I temper it, I like to ding it twice with the hardness tester.
The other of course here is all of this is done with an induction forge and a magnet tool. I just don’t want to cede this interactive process to something “more precise” that’s really just more standing around while the process happens according to rules set by the new media in metalworking. “all heat treatment must be done in a thermostatically controlled oven” or the results will be poor and if not, only good by chance.
This is the fourth of this group of tapered irons. Every single one of them is 68.5/69 hardness out of the quench and 64.5/65 after tempering. This one is 69/65.
It does take a little while to run through the normalizing cycle, pre-quench and then thermal cycling. On an iron that’s thicker, the thermal cycles take a little longer because the iron doesn’t cool to near black as quickly as something like a chisel. But it’s between 10 and 15 minutes of interaction for all of it.
I have no idea how long one thermal cycle takes with an electric heat treat oven, but I know the result isn’t better than this because I’ve got samples that better the book results for hardness and toughness in combination for high carbon plain steels. Samples that were definitely not better than recent results, and probably a little less consistent.
Being able to shape metal freehand and then heat treat it in front of my hands and eyes is freedom. I’ll post at some point, maybe in a couple of weeks, how I taper irons like this. I don’t want a surface ground straight wedge, I want irons like the old ones with a hollow in the back, and I want irons that look like an older iron. That’s just preference, like someone else may like a different color car than I do (that I don’t care about, though).
To make things and get good results, and have it be interactive while doing the making, and primarily in terms of time spent, it’s making. Not arranging, not observing, not waiting, emailing or checking the credit card bill. It’s engaging making, and that’s really nice.
(oh, and are those machine marks on the back of the iron here? This picture is the back – it’s a little hollow in the length to bias where the iron beds…no, they’re draw filing marks from cleaning up the grinding. I’ll clean up the back a little further to adjust out the amount that’s introduced by warping so that this iron will bed properly until it has been consumed by use. Which will never happen – it’ll be straight until rust consumes it sometime in the future after I’m dead)
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 