quenching with grapeseed oil vs canola oil

[clockworkfish]

To preface i want it known that yes i am aware of parks 50 being the ideal quenchent for simple steels however im trying to get a few knives done before next week as they are for a school project so im on a time constraint as far as getting a batch of parks 50 and also my budget will not allow that at the moment.

So i am moving my attention towards oils available in grocery stores i know canola oil is a favorite among many however next to a bottle of canola i noticed a bottle of this grape seed oil. i sloshed both around to see how they compare in terms of viscosity and it appears that grape seed oil is much thiner and was close to what i remember parks looking like (i had a 5 gal thing of it but it was very sadly tossed in a move still calling myself stupid for that one but oh well to late now) Looking on the back of the bottle it said that it was ok to work with up to 425 degrees which is fairly close to the working range of canola.

Would grapeseed oil work better than canola as it is a thinner liquid? my thinking is that thinner fluids allow for a faster extraction of heat because the molecules are much more free to move around but that might be complete bs.

 

[sunshadow]

Canola has plenty of speed for most of what you need if you preheat it to 130f, one of the issues with canola actually is that it keeps cooling quickly where the engineered oils slow down (MF and cooler) which can lead to fracturing from internal stresses if one part of the blade has already stiffened while another is still going through the dimensional instability that accompanies phase change
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[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

Grape seed oil is also about twice the cost of canola, IIRC. You would have to experiment and see how it did compared to canola. It would take a lot of test blades and careful Rockwell and other tests to decide. Even if it was a good quenchant, it costs about the same or a bit more than parks #50.