Thread: Hardness Tester
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Old 03-09-2017, 07:00 PM
Doug Lester Doug Lester is offline
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Location: Decatur, IL
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I would say that most makers don't have a Rockwell hardness tester. You have to have the right conditions to set one up. Like fairly constant temperature and humidity and a clean environment. Something that I don't have. There is also a curve in learning how to use one and also learning their limits. One problem is with shallow hardening steels like 1075. You have to measure parallel surfaces which pretty much means the ricasso. A shallow hardening steel may not have a hardened ricasso due to the thickness or at least it may have mixed phases. That will tell you nothing about the edge of the blade which you can't test accurately due to the fact that the surfaces are not parallel. The way around that is to forge of grind out a coupon less than 1/8" thick with parallel surfaces and test it and hope that the edge of the blade came out the same way.

With all that most of us just use some sort of a performance test like driving the edge through bailing wire or a thin brass rod. You can also test your heat treating method by making a test knife and working the heck out of it and maybe even testing to destruction.

Doug


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