david weaver
..skillful, I guess you can still do it wrong.

O1 is really forgiving, but I have a very ideal setup to heat and quench irons. With one mapp torch, a coffee can forge heats an iron like this relatively slowly so you don't run much risk of overheating it, but it still gets uniformly hot (vs. just trying to use a torch against bricks, etc) inside once it's heated.

It's more like cooking. Choose good ingredients, use decent equipment, pay attention. Results will be good. Try to short one of those things, and results may not be good. At least with O1, even then, they'll still be usable.

if I had a manservant in the house, I'd have him testing all kinds of things all day. I'm curious now about how long a good stock stanley iron would last, because I still really like a good stock stanley iron just as much. I don't think they'll last quite as long, but it doesn't matter. They have good manners and refresh quickly and completely on the stones very easily.