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Ed Caffrey's Workshop Talk to Ed Caffrey ... The Montana Bladesmith! Tips, tricks and more from an ABS Mastersmith.

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  #1  
Old 04-24-2002, 10:52 AM
Don Halter
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A2 problems


I'm finally getting back to the forge after a wrist injury and I was messing with some thin A2 last night.Several times I got odd cracks in it. These occurred at orange temps. I took it out of the coal forge and would notice small cracks sometimes. At first I thought it was just the edge of some scale deposits, but as the steel cooled it became obvious they were infact cracks. It doesn't really look like typical red short results, and I never struck the steel at anything under medium red conditions. This is all tooling scrap, so it's possible the defects were there before forging...but not probable.

I've made quite a bit of chisels and such for armour making out of A2 and never had any problems. These seem much harder to move under the hammer than I remember as well. I got a load of D2 and A2 scrap, so it's also possible the metal was mis-labeled. I was curious if this type problem is typical for A2. I'm using a coal forge and working at bright red to orange heat. These are 1/4" square and 3/8" square pieces being flattened and beveled into main gouche (long, thick spined and narrow) blades. Am I doing anythiong obviously wrong?

Other than already having a lot of A2 and similar steel on hand...I think I'm definitely going to stick with plain carbon and 5160 in the future!...well, maybe a little 52100 also since I have a bucket of 2" bearings!
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Old 04-24-2002, 01:53 PM
Ed Caffrey
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The mis-labeling sounds like the most correct guess. What you discribed is exactly what D-2 does when forged below it's optimum temp. Even when D-2 is at a proper forging temp, the best you can usually hope for is about 1/2 a dozen hits before it goes back in the forge. The red short on D-2 is horrible.
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Old 04-25-2002, 07:17 AM
Raymond Richard
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Don
I would think you should be able to seperate the two steels just by the spark. If I remember the spark from each of these is quite different. Ray6
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Old 04-25-2002, 08:55 AM
Don Halter
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I never thought about sparking them. I have some "known" samples of each as well for comparison. Funny how the simplest solutions often escape us!
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