 This is Alex and I've got a little video here on heat-treating steel. This is a skill that is generally useful for those of us who make our own tools, picks, pension tools, whatever you have, whatever you may need. I'm gonna be sort of fixing up this old pick so that I can attempt to pick some very heavily warded locks. I'm gonna be doing the initial annealing and heat treatment hardening on my kitchen stove. So it's indoors. You want to be careful. Have a fire extinguisher on hand and you know, just use appropriate precautions so you don't hurt yourself or others. The first step is annealing the metal, which is heating it to a certain temperature about a cherry red and then letting it cool in air. This relaxes the metal and creates a particular crystalline grain structure in it and gets it ready for the hardening step, which comes next. You can see that the metal is just blending in with the burner. So we turn the heat off and let it air cool. The next thing we'll see is that the metal, as you might expect, is magnetic. When it reaches a certain temperature later on, we're gonna test for that temperature by checking that it's non-magnetic. We have the quenching solution I'm gonna use. It's a brine made of table salt and warm water. For quenching, you can use plain water, oil, quenching oil, or brine. I chose brine because it's kind of in the middle as far as how quickly it hardens. Here we have the metal is heated up to non-magnetic, so I know that it's hot enough and I'm gonna dunk it into my quenching solution, which would make some hissing noises. Keep the metal moving to evenly cool it. Now we're gonna check that the metal is hard, or what they call glass hard, by running a file along it. The file should sort of slip off of it and not in the t-shirt and grab in. If they do, that means we haven't done a good job hardening it. In this case, it looks pretty good. I want to now clean off the oxidation and scale from the workpiece so that I can see the oxidation products that we will need to look at while we are doing the tempering step of this process. Don't have a proper heat-treating oven, but my toaster oven will get hot enough to take the metal out of the brittle stage and get the handle to the point where I don't have to worry about it breaking or anything. Obviously, again, there's a chance of fire. Make sure you're safe. So we're gonna be heating this up to about 260-280 Celsius, which about as hot as my toaster oven will get in its bake mode. And this should take it to a light straw or straw color. Which is hard, but not brittle. After a few minutes, I'm starting to see. It's hard to see in the picture, but I'm starting to see that color change. And I want to pop it out and make sure I'm not gonna overheat it and make sure that the temper has gone as far as I want it to at this point. After looking at it a little more carefully, I decided to put it back into the oven on broil, which is giving me a little bit more heat and let it go a little bit further to sort of get the the entire thing tempered down a little bit more. And here it is at high speed. Took about five minutes to get this point. I stopped when I started seeing a tiny bit of blue towards the end, which might be an indication that it was overheating. I'm now going to use a torch, which you probably should use outside. To complete the tempering, this is very tricky. It takes a little practice, and I think I actually screwed it up very slightly as we'll see later. But we're basically trying to get that rainbow sort of color through there. Note that the oxidation products will not show up while the flame is on the metal. So you have to keep moving it on and off, or you will overheat it and burn it. So the final result is I got the tip to sort of a dark brown, which is hard. And the shaft had kind of a spring tension. And I'm pretty happy with what I'm seeing so far. Looks durable and doesn't seem to be breakable. And finally, most of what I know about this subject is from this book by Tubal Kane. Getting on amazon.co.uk. Keep it safe and keep it legal. Thanks.