Future Topics with an Objective Comment at the End

Not limited to things I post about, but I will occasionally add information to round out what's listed below in bullet points. The point of this post and the subforum at the outset is to provide basic heat treatment and potentially answers to toolmaking questions after that. But there is little on the internet about hand and eye heat treatment as it would relate to simple steels and woodworking tools. In the last 20 years or so, the discussion has tended toward the knife market, which is primarily interested in creating the next thing you need to have to support sales. Knives are something everyone uses, but when you migrate to knife forums to find out why they are using something like Vanadis 8 and have suddenly decided something else is better, you see that the point is more collecting than using. 

In discussing heat treatment with someone older and with long experience in the knife community last year, the part that is mostly missing - legitimate hands on information about doing good heat treatment with limited means or doing something hands on with more capital involvement just by choice - was not always missing. I will relay things that I have experience with here, nothing is theoretical and if I haven't used something (for example, I have a dewar but have not yet had it filled with nitrogen - that may not always be true, but discussion of the steels and what cryo treatment does will explain why it may be more useful elsewhere). At any rate, I will relay that I haven't, and anyone communicating answers to questions, it's not a requirement that you have proof down to the quark that you've done something, but it would be polite to users to relay when you've done something and when you haven't. By the way, when I relayed what I'd worked up, which is self developed but relies on information from a whole lot of sources - it's not an "invention". I made the acquaintance, relayed what I had discovered or developed over the course of heat treating now probably 500 tools or knives, and snapping samples of steel along the way and getting a few analyzed, and the acquaintance returned an answer that pretty much matched. If you do something that works well, you will find other people did it. 

The discussion will revolve around almost entirely water hardening steels and oil hardening steels, and perhaps some brief comments about heat treating stainless steel in the open atmosphere if you want to make yourself a decent stainless knife. 

To that end, here are the topics - as a post is written, if there is appreciable traffic, it may float off of the first page but will be linked here. If it's not linked, there's nothing there yet:
* Equipment Needed to Heat Treat - basic lowest cost reasonable minimum and useful additions
* Suitable Steel Choices and Quenching Mediums by Tool Type
* What your First Attempt Should Be
* Heating to quench (Austenitizing), Normalizing, Thermal Cycling or Grain Refinement and Tempering (Probably separate posts)
* Martensitic Steel and Basic Discussion of What Happens During Quenching and Tempering
* Carbide vs. Matrix in Steels
* The Effect of Cryo Treatment on Steel from a Woodworking Perspective
* Practical Steel Sources
* The Importance of Snapping Samples to View Grain
* Forging vs. Cut, Shape and Heat Treat
* Other Good Sources of Information

The objective here is that you can get your feet wet for about $100-$200, possibly less to near zero depending on what you have on hand. You can make one off tools that you need without making tools that are irritating to use. The secondary objective here is if you want to make a hobby of toolmaking or switch to using your own knives in the kitchen. You can keep heat treatment in house and make tools that have characteristics that you will have trouble finding commercially, All the way to matching the heat treatment on the best of Japanese tools. Starting last year, you can actually even buy Hitachi White 1 in the US, though there are domestic alternatives to it and one is at least as good and about 1/3rd the cost. Before going far afield, it is the case that you can have success on your first one off plane iron, for example. I followed a Larry Williams video on moulding plane making to get started in this and after buying a hardness tester in the last year, found that it was right in spec and knowing what I know now, would never need to be replaced for any reason. 

If there are questions, I will be uncharacteristically brief (in a helpful way) - the point isn't to ponder and experiment. I learned last year that if there is enough fire, you'll do that on your own and so will I.  

If you've read the list above and feel like the discussion will get too theoretical, there will be a post early on about how to buy basic O1 and and heat treat it to make tools that are good enough to work any wood in the world, and better a lot of what's floating around in the market. Larry Williams' demonstration gives you the potential to do that, but some other limitations described there (growing grain and spoiling irons if heat treating a few times) are actually not the case - you can generally heat simple steels as many times as you'd like and potentially improve them rather than ruining them.