antifreeze quench?

[voppa420]

I was looking at a thread on Bladeforums about Japanese chef's knives, and someone posted a link to a custom japanese maker. There are a few photo's of his shop and in one of them, he has a bucket with a green fluid that looks like antifreeze and a bunch of blades in it. Is this used for quenching or is this some other kind of chemical for another purpose?

[voppa420]

Here's the link....

http://www.watanabeblade.com/english/pro/index.htm

[voppa420]

No takers on this one, huh? Well, I'm guessing it must not be a quenchant because he has a large number of blades in there. Must be some sort of chemical to remove scale? Oh, well, I was just curious.

[RJ Martin]

Being that the bucket I saw was located right next to a belt grinder, I'm guessing that it is an anti-freeze mixture that he uses for cooling the blades as they're being ground. Coolant would help keep the blades from rusting.

[fitzo]

If it's ethylene glycol-based coolant, it's also an inhalation hazard as well as an ingestion and absorption hazard. It's not Ricin, but it's pretty toxic.

[mdagley]

Don't know if this explains it or not..............

I keep a water bucket right under my grinder to cool my blades as I grind. The water in it is very green from all the green chrome rouge that I use on my cork belts for the polishing. It does look a lot like antifreeze.

Mike

[voppa420]

Thanks for the replies guys. It seems that the square blue bucket with all the blade soaking in it is some sort of cleaning chemical. It looks like the portion of the blades in the liquid are shiny, whereas the parts sticking out of the liquid are still dark with scale. If this was just some sort of cooling liquid for when he's grinding, why would he leave the blades sitting in it? Wouldn't they be more suseptable(sp?) to rust?

[Markus40]

My Dad has been making knives for about 30 years, and swears that antifreeze is one of the best quenchants he has used. So what you saw could very well be antifreeze. As for me, I'm sold on the peanut oil I've been using for years. We deep fried a turkey one Thanksgiving, and I kept what was left of the oil, which amounted to several gallons. Every time I quench a blade I smell Thanksgiving all over again!