Forging a tomahawk from a railroad spike 7. making handle while annealing

[123kkambiz]

check for power hammer at youtube:

youtube.com/watch?v=0XSCvCfLiW­s

[flamedrag18]

what do you sell your hawks for?

[xXcagllariXx]

@SWAT487

I'm runnin on coal too. All you gotta to is turn the blower off an pile all the warm or hot clinker on top of the hot coals to lock in heat

[pyrea17]

When you  harden, is it required that you use oil? and if so would something easy to get like veg oil work?

[SWAT487]

Hey man its me again :)

I made my self a coal forge, but i was thinking its easy with your forge to close the end of it and make it cool down slower (Annealing) how can i do that with my coal forge?

[purejpm]

@SWAT487 just turn off the blower that will cause the coke to lose oxygen and start to slowly gool

[asssface2000]

aren't RR spikes a mild steel?, so you would just quench it from red hot when your done and its as hard as it will get, which isnt that hard to be brittle.

[SWAT487]

after annealing, what you do is harden it with oil. Doesnt annealing make metal softer? So after you harden it with oil, wouldn't you anneal it again? I didn't quite get this whole hardening and annealing, then the tempering part LOL im sorry man i just got brain dead. Can you please make annealing, tempering and the hardening more clearer for my dumbass to understand. Thanks

[MrIronman1979]

"Anneal"= Make Dead soft. "Normalize"= stress relieving. "Hardening" = Makes hard, but brittle. "Tempering"= stress reliving through normalizing, then increasing temperature to remove a specific amount of hardness and thus brittle nature. So the process is: Anneal. Harden. Normalize. Temper. Hardening without annealing increases chances of warpage and cracks due to stress from forging. Normalizing allows untransformed austenite to separate into pearlite and ferrite

[MrIronman1979]

tempering draws out some hardness by allowing the retained austenite to fully transform into either tempered martensite or solule back into pearlite / bainite. And also allows the martensite to shrink fit into it's environment a little more comfortably...more room to move so to speak and therefore a bit more flexible.

[SWAT487]

thank you very much, I know i ask a lot of questions lol. Where did you "normalize" in your tomahawk video?

[MrIronman1979]

No problem. :) Normalizing is just the initial bringing up to temperature of about 300 deg...hold it there for a minute or so and then proceed to increase the temperature to the proper tempering range..for the body of the hawk a dark blue decreasing to a nice orange/brown along the cutting edge. It's a good idea to re-normalize at 350 in the litchen oven if it's a precise temperature controlled atmosphere..though I don't care for this method..it works OK. : )

[50cliber]

u are ace love your work