Took me 7 years to realize I was annealing wrong this whole time

I was at a hammer-in near Raleigh last spring, and this old guy named Earl watches me anneal a piece of 1080. He just shakes his head and says 'son, you're chilling that too fast, you're making it harder than it was before.' I'd been quenching in water after heating to non-magnetic for like a decade. Turns out if you water quench plain carbon steel after annealing heat, you're basically normalizing it or even hardening it instead of softening it. I felt like the biggest fool in the shop. Earl told me to just let it air cool on the anvil or bury it in lime or ash. Now I just heat it up, set it on the fire brick, and walk away for 10 minutes. Has anyone else been doing basic stuff wrong for years and just never questioned it?

3 comments

3 Comments

zaranelson4d ago

My buddy Jake water quenched his annealed steel for 5 years before someone told him.

joseph_green134d ago

1075 is actually a 1080 variant, not a separate steel - it's just a finer grain version. But you're right that water quenching after annealing heat is a bad move. I've been there myself, did the exact same thing for a couple years until a guy at a hammer-in near Knoxville set me straight. Now I just heat to non-magnetic, stick it in a bucket of vermiculite, and leave it overnight. That slow cool makes it dead soft every time.

garcia.wren4d ago

Did you at least get a cool t-shirt out of that Knoxville hammer-in, or was the lesson just free of charge? Because I swear, every time I learn the hard way on steel, it costs me about three ruined blades and a new cuss word vocabulary. Vermiculite sounds a lot cheaper than my method of "toss it in the fireplace ashes and hope for the best.