Introduction: Heat Treating 1084 High-Carbon Steel
What you'll need:
- Heat Treating Furnace - I've got another instructable showing you how to build this furnace.
- Source of heat - I'm using a MAPP Gas torch. This one I'm using is quite small and only just puts out enough heat. If you're using a similar sized torch with LPG (Propane), you may not be able to get it up to a high enough temperature.
- Tongs/pliers - something to hold the hot metal with.
- Quenching liquid. I'm using plain ol' Canola oil - this doesn't conduct heat as well as water does, so the rate of cooling isn't as rapid as if I was to use water. There are specialised quenching oils that have well defined rates of cooling - you may need to use these if you're heat treating something a bit more fancy than high carbon steel.
- Container for the quench. Ideally it will be something non-flammable. All I had that was big enough was some 100 mm PVC pipe. This is not ideal! If you've got something made out of metal, please use it!
- Fire extinguisher. You're dealing with red-hot metal, a gas torch and flammable oil. You MUST have something to put out a fire on hand. If you're using a fire extinguisher, make sure it's suitable for oil and grease fires. I'm using a dry chemical extinguisher, it's red with a white stripe around it. It's likely full of Sodium Bicarbonate AKA Baking Soda.
- Magnet - unless you've got some other way to determine the temperature of the metal, like a non-contact thermometer, a magnet is a good way to judge if it's hot enough. When steel is heated up, it undergoes a transition where it will no longer attract a magnet. This is pretty close to the ideal temperature that we want to heat up the steel to.
- Finally, you'll need something made of steel to heat treat. I'm using a knife I made.
Heat treating knives and other tools is really important. Steel is sold in an annealed state so it's soft and was to work. Without heat treating, all you've got is a knife-shaped piece of soft metal, It won't hold an edge very well and it won't be very strong.
Step 1: Apply Heat
You can see that at room temperature, the magnet is strongly attracted to the steel. Put the item to be treated in your furnace, and turn up the heat.
If you followed my previous instructable, you'll see I've also made a door for the oven, this helps keep the heat in and ensures that temperatures are more even inside the oven.
Even with the addition of the door, it was considerably hotter up the back of the oven, where the gas burner is - I'm considering filling in the hole I've made and making another port for the burner 1/3 to 1/2 the way down the side to try and even out the heat - at least along the area where the blade is.
I'm not too concerned about heat treating the handle - this doesn't need to take an edge, rather if it's softer it will be more flexible and less likely to crack.
It took something like 10-15 minutes for the entire blade to get hot enough that it no longer attracted the magnet (that I've put on a handy wooden stick so I didn't need to get my fingers too close to the red-hot metal!)
Unfortunately I couldn't take any photos of this part of the process as I needed both hands to test for magnetism and then get the blade back in the furnace before it cooled down too much.
Step 2: Quench in Oil
Keep checking with the magnet until the entire blade is hot enough - don't worry about the whole handle getting up to temperature, and don't be too concerned about the spine of the blade - it's thicker so will take a bit longer to heat up. Ideally the entire piece will be a nice even temperature, but I just couldn't achieve that with this furnace.
When you're at the right temperature, carefully remove the blade from the furnace and place it tip-down in the oil. You might get it flaring up here, I was lucky and there weren't any flames. I drilled a hole in the handle to hang the blade from - leave it in the oil (swirling it around a bit to even out the temperatures) until it's cooled down enough to handle.
As you can see from the results when I pulled the blade out of the oil, I got some warping along the blade. I inadvertently ground this section of the blade too thin and thought that it may cause me problems.
You probably want to keep the thinnest part of the blade to about 0.5 – 0.8 mm (0.02 - 0.03") in thickness, any thinner and you greatly increase the risk of warping the edge of the blade during the quench.
Step 3: Temper, Temper!
The final step in the process is tempering.
Once the steel has been heated and then quenched in the oil, it's now very hard. Hardness ≠ toughness. Hardened steel that hasn't been quenched is very brittle and can easily shatter if dropped.
What we now want to do is bring the hardness down a bit to re-introduce some springiness and flex into the metal. This will result in a far tougher blade that while it has a hard edge that stays sharp, it's able to flex and bend instead of breaking.
For high carbon steel, it needs to be heated up to 200°C (400°F), held at this temperature for an hour and then left to cool back down to room temperature. This is then repeated another two times – for a total of three heat cycles.
Many online guides say to only do this when your wife is out, or to use your own oven for the heat treat - this is probably the case if you use old motor oil or something else that's not edible for your quenching process. I used fresh canola oil and it just smelled like baking – my wife even decided to throw in a batch of muffins into the oven while I was doing this, for a win-win situation all-round.
Leave it to slowly cool down at the end (i.e., don't dunk it in water or anything like that) and then you can get on to the final finishing and sharpening.

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14 Comments
8 years ago on Introduction
I have seen my grandpa make many knives, and this isn't how he would temper. By baking the entire knife in the oven at the end, you have now taken that hardness out of the blade. This makes it likely to go dull faster and be weak against hard materials.
What you should do is take that torch of yours and just slowly heat the spine. Going up and down it real slow until it starts to blue. Then you just take the blue and fade it about halfway down to the middle of the knife. Stick that in a bucket of sand over night and that is that.
Now you got a knifes edge so hard it wont even file, a file will run over the blade like its glass because its too hard to cut . And a knife so flexible it wont shatter if you get it stuck in something and you start prying on it. Here is an album but I need to get better pictures of him doing the bluing. Most of the pictures are of me and him doing the knife we made for my Christmas present last year.
https://goo.gl/photos/cqAMScciW4YoxTfG8
Reply 6 years ago
Sounds nice, but it REALLY depends on the steel. What you described might make a fantastic, sharp, tough knife with one type of steel - and a lousy one with another. Steels are complicated.
Reply 7 years ago
Hi
If u heat it until it's going to become blue it will be soft again it's used to the handle and then u can drill holes in it so it will lose of the weight a little bit it must have to be baked if u don't the oil will come of easily or flake away so he is doing it in the right way ;)
Reply 8 years ago on Introduction
Wow. Those are gorgeous knives.
Reply 8 years ago on Introduction
Thanks for the kind words! I'm making another one and I won't grind the edge as thin as this one, so it should survive the heat treat process :D
Reply 8 years ago on Introduction
Whilst it's true heating to 200°C/400°F will slightly reduce the hardness of the blade (as well as the rest of the knife) it also increases flexibility and toughness.
The blade is still quite hard (a file still skates across the surface) but it's got a small amount of flex. It's also considerably less brittle than an un-tempered edge.
If you know what you're doing, a partial tempering like your grandpa does can give outstanding results as you can make the spine of the knife softer and more flexible and keep more hardness in the blade.
Thanks for the link to the photos too!
7 years ago
Hi!
I have one question :D
So I tried to quench my knife in motor oil to give it a nice dark texture but it didn't go out pretty well every time I done the quench it's going to be very awful.
On the 1. picture I done the quench than I sanded it down because it was horrible :D somewhere it had the oil texture somewhere it didn't so on the 2.&3. picture I did it again but it become so bad, a little bit better but not perfect... what can I do?
Thank you :)
8 years ago on Introduction
Thats sweet
8 years ago on Introduction
Even if the knife didn't fare too well, at least you used the heart- healthy Canola oil. ☺
Reply 8 years ago on Introduction
how did you do the smiley face?
Reply 8 years ago on Introduction
Alt key + Numkey 1, then enter to a new line. For some reason they don't always take if you exit the comment on the same line. ☺
This is Numkey2: ☻
Reply 8 years ago on Introduction
™¢∞§§¶••ªøππƒµ©∂µß˚ƒ≥√µ∫˜ßπß∂¬ƒæ÷¬≤ hmmm I'm on an apple mac maybe it is different
Reply 8 years ago on Introduction
Try this instruction:
http://www.wikihow.com/Type-Symbols-Using-the-ALT-...
I'm using a pc.
Reply 8 years ago on Introduction
For sure! Got to make sure you have that green tick ??