What’s just fine?

I can simpathize with Jake's question. I know that commercial quenchants are the best way to go. However I have some kind of illness that causes me to be fascinated with things that work well for something other than their specific purpose. Specifically if it is cheaper, and/or more readily available than the purpose made product.

The R&D that the quenchant manufacturers put into their products allows you to know just what a given steel will do in a given quenchant under certain parameters. This allows people with a strong grasp of metallurgy to make the best blades possible.

However without that understanding of metallurgy you are once again just taking someone else's word on what "works". It seems that what is really needed is not the perfect quenchant, but an in-depth knowledge of metallurgy.

It makes me think of the difference between a chef and a cook. I can follow a recipe with the best of them, but I am no chef. Likewise, I should be able to follow the steps someone else has laid out to make a decent knife, but I won't consider myself a pro until I can tell you exactly why my method is the best I am capable of doing.
 
Hi Justin - I think the only difference here is that you can choose to follow another cook's recipe or you can follow a recipe from a chef. Sure, I'm not testing the same things Houghton or Heatbath are, I can't, but I believe I can trust their metallurgists more than a one-off recipe that was cooked up in a back yard.

You could liken this to reloading bullets - none of us has the pressure testing equipment to know for sure if our cases are over pressure in one condition or another. We can look for signs that may or may not be visible depending on the firearm and the conditions, but we don't have the stuff to know for sure. We have to rely on charts and bullet speeds to determine if we're doing it right - we have to take someone elses' word for it. We could take reloading advice from someone whose been doing it for 20+ years and has "tried it all" or we can take it from an industry manual. Sure, his experience is valuable, but he's not getting paid to know the things that the manual writers are.
 
No disrespect , intendid, but I have been thinking about the whole cooking analogies that are being used and it made me think, I think if Mr. Cashen were to be a chef, he'd be like that guy from the TV show "Hell's Kitchen" ....hehehe,
 
Something I would think anyone could take from Kevin's information is that if you can't afford the right oils, use a steel that can have a slower quench and still hit the Martensite field.

As an aside, Mendel might not be the best example to throw out for great scientific breakthroughs. His results are mathematically perfect and most scientists think he must have fudged his data to work right. It is nearly impossible to get that kind of results in natural systems.
 
I've got an idea - I've got a couple of goats running around the house that really irritate me- why don't we stage a live goat-quenching?

....come on guys, lighten up, if it weren't for myths, legends and possibly skewed history, this world would be dang boring! It all adds to the "mystique" of bladesmithing. It would appeal to darn few people if it were all kept to a purely scientific realm. It's the wonder and "mystery" that allures a lot of people that purchase your blades. If I quench my knives in horse urine and pork lard, tell the customer that, he buys and is satisfied with a knife.....aren't we all better off? It's the intangibles, the unknowns, that little something different that separates us, that makes us unique.
For example, you ask multiple major league baseball players and most all of them will tell you the very basic aspects of hitting that they all agree on, they will encourage you to teach your kids to do it the right way. But you watch a major league game and only a few of those fellows do all the basics the same way, but is there any doubt they are at the pinacle of their profession? I'll bet you they tried multiple stances and swings over the years before they settled on the one that was "theirs", evenso, they will have to "tune-up" every now and then...just as we do when we try something new or ask, "hey, what to do you do?" It may or may not work with the rest of our "swing". (I love baseball analogies for life) :)
 
[/quote]You could liken this to reloading bullets - none of us has the pressure testing equipment to know for sure if our cases are over pressure in one condition or another. We can look for signs that may or may not be visible depending on the firearm and the conditions, but we don't have the stuff to know for sure. We have to rely on charts and bullet speeds to determine if we're doing it right - we have to take someone elses' word for it. We could take reloading advice from someone whose been doing it for 20+ years and has "tried it all" or we can take it from an industry manual. Sure, his experience is valuable, but he's not getting paid to know the things that the manual writers are.[/QUOTE]


That's a good analogy except that the guy who's done it all for 20 years was likely "pushing the envelope for bullet perfomance" and the gun industry guru's publish what is "safe" given their individual parameters set by their companies. If I want the top in peformance, I would push it till it blows up then back off a little.....reloading manuals are a good starting point but generally don't portray what is "possible", that is only found through testing....much like bladesmithing IMO.
 
He's pushing the envelope in his firearm and his climate/conditions. Think his rounds will be safe in yours? We can test for pressure signs in our weapons (but only by visual cues), but how are you going to be able to test to see if your heat treating practices are better than industry standards?

Even the guy who has been doing it for 20 years probably started with those industry manuals and worked from there. We see quite the opposite in home brew quench products.
 
I think we both are correct in this particular arguement, and perhaps the differences lie in the margins. If "X" marginal quenchant only compares at 96% to the industry standard, who is ever really going to find that 4%? If blade A fails at scale 10 and blade X fails at scale 8 but normal usage only ever reaches scale 5.....what difference does it make? I think therein lies the idea of "just fine". Twist the firearm analogy around, the deer I kill with a 180 gr. 30-06 traveling at 2700 fps is just as dead at the one you kill at 2850 fps through the same gun. But it is obvious your bullet was at the pinacle of performance and mine was "just fine."

I think it is all about application and usage and what scale of perfomance rating one chooses to subscribe to. And you never know, as we learn more and more about steel on a molecular level, we may all be quenching in liquified chicken litter in 10 years....although I hope not, it really stinks :)
 
We could always take that a step further and say that my harbor freight folding utility knife is just fine. It does everything I -need- a knife to do. I also paid $5 for it. When people pay hundreds, I don't think there's anything wrong with expecting a person to shell out for quality materials and the means to make them the best.

All of this is just academic for me anyhow, I've already decided to step away from carbon steels for most all knives and already have methods for the occasions that I choose carbon steel. I just think that the "just fine" mentality is perpetuated far too often out of apathy and/or cheapness as opposed to testing and "pushing the envelope" of home quenching.
 
Simple General Rule #1: Do it the best you can.

Maybe theres some magic pigsnot that might work or be the next best thing, but until you are able to NAIL your HT with the currently-established best practices, you shouldnt even be thinking about experimentation, IMHO.

I honestly, honestly don't understand not investing in quality HT quenchant. Even the most expensive stuff is fairly cheap compared to belts, tools, steel, handle materials, etc etc etc....but the bottom line is anyone who is gonna use a knife would prefer a blade that is heat treated properly and I think it should be one of the first things you try to nail down after learning the basics of knifemaking.

A year ago I wanted to learn how to solve a rubik's cube. I found a current methodology to do so and learned it. Wouldn't it have been silly to try to develop my own system of solving a rubik's cube before even solving it once with the current methods? Why throw away all the work others have done for you?

I know that if I was HTing my blades in bacon grease and had metal experts telling me it wasnt the best way, i'd be questioning every single knife that came off my bench, even if they seemed "fine." For me, proper quenchant gives me piece of mind on top of the benefits it has on blades.
 
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Can it be said that to be a top-rate deer hunter you must be shooting a Dakota or Kimber mounted with Swarovski scope. Or a top flight bird hunter unless you are toting a Holland&Holland or high grade Parker?
That Richtig fella musta had his hands in some pretty potent mumbo-jumbo, eh?
 
birdog4 said:
Can it be said that to be a top-rate deer hunter you must be shooting a Dakota or Kimber mounted with Swarovski scope. Or a top flight bird hunter unless you are toting a Holland&Holland or high grade Parker?
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Absolutely not, but they aren't fabricating deer or birds.

But to be a top-rate deer rifle fabricator, you'd need to produce rifles with similar precision and quality to Dakota or Kimber.

Could you turn the rifling with your drillpress at home? Sure. Would the accuracy be "fine?" Well that would depend on what you wanted to hit with the gun....

If you wanted to start working towards those manufacturer's accuracy levels, you'd slowly start refining your processes and studying the established way of doing things.

...or you could focus on the aesthetics and produce beautiful guns with accuracy that may or may not be up to par with their looks.
 
Steve Hayden said:
Something I would think anyone could take from Kevin's information is that if you can't afford the right oils, use a steel that can have a slower quench and still hit the Martensite field.

As an aside, Mendel might not be the best example to throw out for great scientific breakthroughs. His results are mathematically perfect and most scientists think he must have fudged his data to work right. It is nearly impossible to get that kind of results in natural systems.
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Bingo. Most of the arguing is moot with something like O-1 or 1084, and completely with A-2 or D-2.

I still like my 1095/W1 though. Water works every time.
 
OKZK, an actual comparrison would be cool tho dont ya think? an actual test of quenchents and not just the usual we have here on the forum. "it works just fine" or on the other side of the line "if you dont do it this way it sucks"

scientific mumbo jumbo that none of understand doesnt really answer the question.

jake
 
strahd71 said:
OKZK, an actual comparrison would be cool tho dont ya think? an actual test of quenchents and not just the usual we have here on the forum. "it works just fine" or on the other side of the line "if you dont do it this way it sucks"

scientific mumbo jumbo that none of understand doesnt really answer the question.

jake
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I think that'd be great! I have my reasoning because I can see scientific data to support the quenchants that are available. I just havent seen any studying some of the oddball mixtures people have come up with. If I admit that I do not fully know every detail of whats going on in the quenching process, i figure i'll at least go with something that has some facts backing it up.

Plus, i barely have time to make knives, so i just don;t have the time to run much testing between various HT experiments. I wish I did because its such cool stuff.

I heat treated in all kinds of weird stuff before i got some oil. Am I 100% sure my new oil is better than the veggie oil I used to use? I can't "prove" it, but I don't even think about it any more when I used to wonder and try different things because i just wasnt sure if what I was doing was good enough. Its hard to gauge going from veggie to quenching oil because I got better at making knives at the same time, so I feel my knives perform better now but that could be as simple as me getting better at the angles I sharpen at...

Who knows? My head hurts.... haha! Why do we do this to ourselves? Why am I here? OMG WHO AM I???? ok....deep breaths... :D ;D
 
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"Oh the humanity" (Herbert Morrison, May 6, 1937 - New Jersey's Lakehurst Naval Air Station).

I thought that by now every knifemaker would understand that in order to get the most "bang-for-the-buck", you must quench your blade facing due north on a full-moon night (just before Jay Leno comes on), and be wearing nothing but a leather bibb and flip-flops.

The "quench-unt" media needs to consist of at least a little bacon grease, chopped up bat-wings, and the sweat from a virgin's brow. Proportions of the former ingredients are not important as long as you have a pretty hot fire.

Now you know the "troof". It works for me and most folks, however, finding virgins is getting harder and harder to do.

R.D.
 
what i would love to see is something like this.

identicle blades all made and Ht the same but quenched in different liquids. and then a performance test and then maybe the scientific test. to me the scientific isnt as important as the performance.

possible quenchents... parks, atf, mineral oil, water/brine, and wayne goddards goop

this is kind of what i was after in this thread........... very interested in the turkey quench tho

jake
 
atakach said:
No disrespect , intendid, but I have been thinking about the whole cooking analogies that are being used and it made me think, I think if Mr. Cashen were to be a chef, he'd be like that guy from the TV show "Hell's Kitchen" ....hehehe,
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I would have to say that is an accurate comparison since I feel that Gordon Ramsay is an arrogant jerk who could use a belt in the mouth. I have been thinking about this thread today while I worked in the shop and need to say a few things.

Kevin R. Cashen said:
Now if ever there was a thread worthy of hijacking this may be it, so let’s get thoroughly engrossed in the complexities if turkey quenching!
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This was just wrong! I was out of line and should have nothing else to say except that I am sorry. No thread should be hijacked and I don’t know who I thought I was to presume to make that pronouncement.:foot: Jake you asked a good question in this thread and you deserve to have it answered to your satisfaction by any who wish to contribute. I got my shorts in a bind for no good reason and ended up walking all over you in the process.

One of the things I thought about today was what my problem could be, perhaps it is Blade show stress or perhaps just ennui, but I have been posting like a primadonna lately. One thing I really need to learn is that if I don’t agree with something I have the option of not opening my big mouth, and moving on to another conversation. If it is any consolation I have been a snippy jerk here at home lately as well.

This is one reason why I hate the whole guru concept, nobody deserves special treatment, otherwise they tend to take things and other people for granted. Instead of praise what people like me need is to be put in their place when they feel the can start preaching instead of providing information. In the future when I get out of line I would appreciate being told to contribute something useful or to shut up already.

If all concerned will accept my apologies I would really like to back off and allow this thread to continue in the way it should have before I climbed up on my high horse. I really should have better things to do than to talk down to you good folks.
 
it was probably my fault...... maybe i just didnt word it like i wanted/ or to where it made sense.

jake
 
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