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Old 07-15-2017, 08:51 PM
WNC Goater WNC Goater is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2015
Location: NC Mountains
Posts: 470
Lots of questions that I will defer to the more experience guys but to put your mind at ease about a couple of those last questions.
Yes, you can temper in your own oven or even a toaster oven. Just dont trust the temperature settings to be accurate. Get a good accurate thermometer so you will know the temp. 600 degrees isn't necessary, most tempering is done under 500.

LN isn't necessary for producing a good blade. Some guys want to tweak aas much as they can out of a steel and opt for using LN to do that. Many knifemakers, heck I'll guess most, dont use LN.

You can use a forge for HT some of the easier carbon steels but you'll soon want to go beyond that and will not be able to get optimum HT with a forge. So unless you plan to build a cheap forge(and they are fairly easy and can be cheap to build), you can buy a HT oven for not much more than a good forge and it will enable you to get much better results and use some steels that just cannot be suitably HT in a forge.


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