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Stopped heat-treating my blades in the dark after 8 years
Ngl I always thought I could just eyeball the color for tempering, worked fine for me. Then I watched this old timer at a demo in Portland use a $20 oven thermometer and realized I was off by 50 degrees half the time. Has anyone else found a cheap tool that changed their process completely?
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the_terry16d ago
Man, that demo sounds like a wake-up call. How off were you on the actual hardness of your blades when you tested them after? I'm curious if the difference was enough to mess with edge retention or just made them brittle for no reason.
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nguyen.blake15d ago
Honestly, the bigger issue might not even be edge retention or brittleness yet. It could be that the flex in the blade changed enough to mess with how the steel actually behaves under load during a cut, like micro-deformations that compound over time. Ngl, a few points off Rockwell can throw off the whole mechanical feel of a blade before it ever chips or dulls.
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