Harden 1018? Fact or Fiction

[trentu]

I've read a lot of confusing stuff. I can get a lot of scraps from work but can you harden it? Has anyone made a knife out of it. Heat treated it and actually used it?

 

[B Finnigan]

18 points of carbon (.18%) is just not enough carbon to harden.

 

[Phillip Patton]

Funny you should ask. I had a couple pieces of 1018, but I thought I might have mixed it up with my 1095, so I water quenched a couple samples yesterday. One was 40 rc, the other 25 rc. No, it's not good blade material.

 

[Jeff Clark]

You might try cold hammering a bevel onto it. It will work harden if you work it cold.

 

[mdoyle]

Not worth it. GOOD knife steel is just too cheap to bother trying to "make something else work".
Matt

 

[Danbo]

If you can get 1018 to harden, I wanna shake your hand(and, know how you did it).

 

[Guy Thomas]

Fact, especially if there is something like manganese present. The mechanism for hardening is similar for most carbon steel, it will begin to harden if quenched from 1320 degrees but full hardening for this steel probably would not take place until heated closer to 1600 degrees and quenched in something drastic like water water or brine (or super-quench type solutions). It just won't develop a similar hardnes as a higher carbon steel ending up with a maximun as quenched hardness of somewhere around 45 Rc or so. So yes it will develop martensite and harden but not enough to make a useable tool out of.

 

[MDG]

The only way you could get a useful hardness is to carburise case harden it. A specialist firm could do that by either gas or liquid carburisation. This process adds extra carbon into the surface. But it is not worth it as better materials are available at reasonable cost.

 

[JCaswell]

The only way you could get a useful hardness is to carburise case harden it. A specialist firm could do that by either gas or liquid carburisation. This process adds extra carbon into the surface. But it is not worth it as better materials are available at reasonable cost.

I've had this done for a specialty application. It was a 'deep carburizing routine' done for me by Hinderliter/Bodycote. It essentially penetrated clean through thin stock (I believe it was about 3/16). This resulted in a carbon average of .68 (+/-), and was hardenable, of course.
Obviously not cost effective for knives and not really to the point of this thread since it was really a process of converting 1018 into approx. 1068, not just hardening plain'ol 1018.

 

[MDG]

Carburising is still a very useful technique for specialist applications. I have used it in the past when I practiced as an engineer. All in all, I think that the 1018 is not of much use to Trentu except for practice. It would be useful for that as it would be difficult to ruin.