Heat treating 5160 spring steel bowie

heres a compilation of my bowie being heat treated in my new charcoal forge, still has one more tempering cycle in the oven but aside from that it appears everything was successful! the images and vid of it just sitting in the charcoal is just preheating before I normalized the material, the latter of the vid is heating for the quench...unfortunately due to the dangerous nature of quenching in oil i could not take videos of that or images.

Specs of blade are 10" of blade, 8 1/4" of edge, with handle on it will be 16" overall.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• spring
• steel
• 5160
• leaf
• heat
• treating
• charcoal
• forge

[TheEggopoop]

I'm new to this, but was wondering if you could help me out. When working with this steel did you first anneal it before working it or did you just work it "as is" and then heat treat?

[wolfie83]

@TheEggopoop Anneal it 3 times to ensure the steel is homogeneous.

[nickwoo2]

i would place the spine of the knife in the deepest part of the coals first.

[wolfie83]

@nickwoo2 i was rotating it between the spine and edge with the flame lower then for the final heat...this blade actually failed though during heating for the second quench (double anneal and then double quench), I have to modify the forge as there is an insane hotspot which I didn't anticipate so now that I know to sought that I should have a more controllable outcome.

was a shame, was going to be a nice bushcraft piece.

[jackdog20]

@calmackie should quench in oil

[calmackie]

What were you quenchig in?