Gas forge for heat treatment is WRONG... or is it?

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Жыл бұрын

...here are 6 reasons why you shouldn't heat treat on a gas forge! Heat treating of a gas forge has been used for centuries by old smiths and is a very much well-accepted form of heat treating system by many knife makers, but not highly recommended by metallurgists especially if you want to sell your knives as a professional. Why? Watch the entirety of this amazing heat treatment comparison video with Tobias Hangler of Messerschmiede Hangler (Graz, Austria) where he talks to us about the (very few) pros and cons of heat treating your knife in a gas forge.
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Пікірлер: 65

@UKBladeshow Жыл бұрын

Are you still heat treating off a gas forge? Check out other heat treatment system comparisons by metallurgist Tobias Hangler HERE: bit.ly/3I3iywb

@jack75ish Жыл бұрын

I do my heat treatment in an electric kiln , but i do know quite a few ABS master smiths that use a gas forge for their heat treatment and i will happily pit their blades up against any in the world !

@UKBladeshow Жыл бұрын

Hi Jack! Just like with any equipment, there’s Anaya pros and cons. I hope this video explained the advantages and disadvantages of using a gas forged for heat treatment! Thanks!

@JacksonDunnoKnows Жыл бұрын

I get it. I've been using coal for the past two years, and recently just got my first gas forge for Christmas. Good info! Now for beginners/novice smiths, use what you got. If you're wanting to take the step into professional smithing, then yeah this would be something to definitely look into/work towards. I'm not aiming to be a bladesmith, my goal is to be more of a tool builder/ornamental smith who also does blades. I'm wanna be as well rounded as I can. I am working towards swords. I've made a nice handful already! Lol but need to get some more equipment. Better grinder, need to rig up a few jigs and such but I'm at it everyday. Again, great vid guys!🍻

@UKBladeshow Жыл бұрын

Hi Jackson Dunno good morning and thanks for the feedback! Happy to hear your background and journey on smithing! Yeah, gas forges can be used for heat treatment for sure, especially if you have one already. Thanks for the comment and speak to you again soon!

@zgi5950 Жыл бұрын

Very cool second part, cant wait for the next episode!

@UKBladeshow Жыл бұрын

Thanks for the comment again mate! Yeah next two are kilns and fluidised sand beds! Very interesting and I was surprised to learn things about these other systems that I wish I knew before! Thanks for watching!

@linowiroto1207 Жыл бұрын

for those who don't know, Tobias Hangler is also one of the three people who came up with Apex Ultra steel, which is considered currently as one of the best modern steel for knifemaker (for forging specifically). I've got two knives made out of this steel, one is copper damascus petty with Apexultra core at 67HRC, very thin behind the edge, keep sharp for a long time(I cook for a living). It's my main knife that I use the most alongside a big Takeda gyuto. I use the petty knife for almost anything, everyday, and I can tell you it has not chip at all even once. Not even micro chipping. The other knife he made for me was mono steel Cleaver inspired by Sugimoto style (they're massive and hefty), and they're also very thin behind the edge and keep sharp for long. and I still got two special project in mind that I'm planning to ask him to do within the next couple months when I can afford to, if he's still willing and interested. My point is, when he says he is perfectionist in his output and quality and heat treatment, trust me. he is!!!

@UKBladeshow Жыл бұрын

Wow Lino thanks for your feedback and glad to see that you understood the craftsmanship that Tobias produces! Happy to hear that you can use the fruits of his labour as his work is beyond what I was expecting! He is a pool of knowledge willing to share all these wonderful information and we should be extremely thankful for his generosity! Thanks again Lino!

@realbroggo Жыл бұрын

I'm just a hobbyist and have only made a few knives for fun and the forge I go to will only allow me to use their electric kiln because of the hazards associated with gas forging esp. gas emissions. They also advised that the electric kiln is generally easier to use. I have never questioned their judgement - now i understand their judgement even more - thank you! This is great info even for those who don't make knives - helps understand the heat treatment process and why it can vary so much. Merry Christmas and sharp blades to all!

@UKBladeshow Жыл бұрын

Hello again David and thanks for the comprehensive feedback! As always, tooling up always helps with processes, including knife making. But as Tobias mentioned, you can use gas forges as Tobias has mentioned but then then again, they have disadvantages (and advantages). Happy to hear you found the video insightful! Thanks!

@billiejohns6270 Жыл бұрын

The burners we sell at gammaco Artisan supply you can forward Jane heat treat their a beautiful burner they sell them in the UK to

@GemAppleTom Жыл бұрын

Good stuff again Vinz and Tobias 😊 This kind of information is really helping me realistically plan my dreamed of shed. One day… one day…

@UKBladeshow Жыл бұрын

Cheers again Tom! Before you finalise your dream shed, you better wait for the fluidised sand bed vid mate ;) Speak to you again soon!

@GemAppleTom Жыл бұрын

@@UKBladeshow I’ve used fluidised beds in industry before. A video about them would be another fine addition to the series. Again well done. You’re on a roll.

@UKBladeshow Жыл бұрын

Excellent! Would be glad to hear your thoughts (compared to Tobias’ perspective) on those things. Up next will be the all-known kilns though.

@GemAppleTom Жыл бұрын

@@UKBladeshow I don’t know much about kilns so will definitely be looking for that one. One of the big pros for fluidised beds is the temp homogeneity and temp stability. You need to put in quite a large lump of steel to change a bed’s temperature significantly. Which can be a con as you can’t quickly ramp up or down in temperature. They take a lot of energy to heat up but don’t lose it easily so good and bad. They’re really not efficient with gas use at lower temperature but are pretty good at forging temperatures. You’d be daft to use one to temper if you’ve got a bog standard kitchen oven you could use instead. They can also let you do some of the more exotic heat treatments like austempering or martempering more easily than other furnace types. It’s bloody dusty. Oh and if you want a bubbling lava pit feature for your forge you can’t get better.

@jwjenkins421 Жыл бұрын

As someone who is making knives with a desire to sell my work, what would you recommend as the best option for heat treatment? I've been leaning toward a heat treating service until I make enough to purchase an electric heat treating oven, but is a fluidized sand is better I may want to look at the cost of that instead. What would you recommend?

@UKBladeshow Жыл бұрын

Hi J Jenkins. I am no expert on heat treatment myself but I personally still wouldn't recommend a fluidised sand bed for someone who is just starting; it is not cheap to run, needs complex materials, and is more advanced. For beginners who want to take selling knives seriously, I'd suggest you consider the electric kiln/oven you mentioned. There are plenty of good brands out there such as Paragon, Rockblade, Evenheat, or you can even make your own kilns (lots on KZfaq). I hope that helps!

@GemAppleTom Жыл бұрын

Contract heat treatment is a sensible option. Even if you know heat treatment inside and out you’ll still need proper measuring and control equipment to maintain quality which all costs money. A heat treater will already have properly calibrated thermocouples etc to do the job in the first place. Once you’ve started ramping up production and are doing a good deal of business it may be worth investing. It’ll reduce your turn around time if you can do the heat treatment in house instead of sending it out and getting it back a few days later.

@craigmurrayauthor Жыл бұрын

it would appear to be a basic design problem. I see some gas forges that are little more than a single supply nozzle at one end. Smaller and more nozzles spaces evenly along the chamber would provide a more homogeneous temperature. The use of a shield between material and burners would also alleviate hotspots as it is not the direct flame hitting it but the air temperature. A smaller surface area or volume would suit better as well. Why is your kiln 12"/30cm square if the biggest thing that goes into it is a 4"/100mm billet. Multiple thermal sensors with a simple controller could restrict or open supply valves in real time. I could be wrong on these items, if so please advise.

@GemAppleTom Жыл бұрын

You’re not wrong. All your suggestions make sense. It is a case of cost though. If you’ve got the fabrication equipwmnt yourself you can probably make the changes fairly cheaply if not then you’re spendingh a lot of money when a basic furnace will just about do the job if you’re careful. A small chamber is best for temperature control… until you decide you want to do something just a little bit bigger and realise you should have gone for the larger one. It’s all swings and roundabouts for the best results for the money you’ve got.

@harwoodblades3633 Жыл бұрын

Good video Vince.. don't agree entirely though 🙄a great knife can be heat treated in a gas forge if you know what your doing 👍 the only thing I can say is a knife kiln will get you consistent results but it's not the be all and end all.. hope you're having a good Christmas 👍🤙

@tobiashangler Жыл бұрын

Yes it can absolutely, but making 100 knives and having them all be the same is pretty impossible. That's why i am not big fan of doing it this way. It's of course a personal opinion and a generalization as some gas forges will be better suited than others.

@harwoodblades3633 Жыл бұрын

@@tobiashangler a tip for anyone trying it for the first time on carbon steels is to put coarse sea salt on the blade..salt melts at 801 degrees Celsius and will give you a decent starting point for blade temperature..hope it helps someone 👍

@UKBladeshow Жыл бұрын

Hello mate good afternoon and Merry Christmas to you 🎄 I hear your comments on gas forges and agree that you van get good results on gas forges to as smiths have done for decades! As you may have seen, the video was a comparison; pros and cons of various systems including kilns, gas forges, heat treatment and we will even cover fluidised sand beds! Hope you’ll enjoy the other upcoming vids mate! Speak again soon!

@krissteel4074 Жыл бұрын

Digital thermometers are a thing for somewhere between $50-80, some of the better ones will have two ports to read off different thermocouples and you can space them around/in the area you're heat treating a work piece. I don't trust 'eyeball temperature readings' based off colour, fair enough if its something like cherry red or bright yellow you've got a fair indication, but the subtlety for a specific temp just really isn't much more than educated guesswork. At least for me anyway- also don't look into the forge for long periods of time! So I say yes, you can heat treat in a gas forge, however, you do need some type of temp reader I do use a kiln though for my work, its relatively livable in terms of time between 100-900C and just runs off 10A 240V, but I modified it to run a gas torch + chimney for faster ramp times usually between that 800 to 1100C range for some stainless and tool steels that need very high temps. Plus if I'm doing batches I can ramp up to temp again quicker with the gas input running with the electrical elements as well. Mostly comes down to the setup, the thermocouple in the kiln is maybe 2-3cm right above where the edge of the blade is and given its large thermal mass it can maintain a very consistent and even temperature. Thats not a completely off the shelf solution though for everyone, but there's still some pro's to using gas and kilns

@GemAppleTom Жыл бұрын

I’m hearing from what you said that a gas forge is doable but there are avoidable pitfalls along the way to get the quality right. A fair summary of what you said?

@krissteel4074 Жыл бұрын

@@GemAppleTom Yep, pretty much. If you can afford a good kiln by all means make it a fairly high priority on your list of big equipment. Otherwise you can give digital thermometers a go and see if that's improving things for you. There are some companies which make PID controllers for forges which allow you to dial in a temp pretty accurately just with a regulation of gas-air flow. I wouldn't say they're cheap, but they're under 1000 bucks (Australian dollars) for a single burner control and do require a bit of tuning to suit the burner(s) and the forge itself. Avoiding hot-spots is more or less up to the operator as well, but they exist

@GemAppleTom Жыл бұрын

@@krissteel4074 Cheers :} I know how I’d run a contract heat treatment centre but it’s not the same as a hobby blacksmithing forge in a shed (my plan for the future). Getting this kind of advice from actual blade makers is much appreciated.

@tobiashangler Жыл бұрын

@@GemAppleTom of course gas forges can be heavily modified to make them more suitable for heat treating. I am referring to a typical off the shelf solution with direct burners, a relatively small chamber and without temperature controllers in this video. If you decide to build a heat treatment furnace fueled with propane, the final furnace would likely look very different from a typical gas forger to get more even temperature distributions. But i think by then the electrical kiln might be the cheaper option 😊

@GemAppleTom Жыл бұрын

@@tobiashangler Thanks for the feedback :)

@hermannebner9649 6 ай бұрын

Servus Frage was hast du für eine Gasesse Grüße

@timjohle8876 Жыл бұрын

I see this and really start to wonder how the mid evil century smiths ever made a single blade worth swinging. I bet they would have sold their first born for a gas forge.

@UKBladeshow Жыл бұрын

Hi Tim thanks for taking time to comment! For sure, the earlier smiths (and current ones) have used gas forge for heat treatment but as you know, we advanced in our knowledge and have come up with various other methods to improve the way we work! Gas forges are a cheap and handy way for heat treatment of blades but they do have some drawbacks. Thanks for watching!

@tobiashangler Жыл бұрын

Hey Tim, of course i am comparing the gas forge to whats available today. Also I am a perfectionist that strives dor the best performance and the most consistent output i can get. Getting a steel hardened isn't all that difficult, but looking at historical pieces they just had a lot more fluctuations in their outout. Even some of the makers that were known for their excellent heat treatments had significant fluctuations in their process that we can nowadays easily eliminate by using proper kilns. So please take my point of view as the opinion of a perfectionist, there are other ways that work too. I am personally just not a fan of selling anything that was heat treated in a rather uncontrolled fashion.

@mikafoxx2717 3 ай бұрын

Back then they were a commodity. The good blade Smiths were just very well practiced with getting the temperatures correct. Thousands of blades and you eventually get it right, most of the time.

@littlebear1520 Жыл бұрын

Yes the gas is the most efficient as far as dollars-and-cents go or for you all across the pond pounds and pents, the only type of forge I have not used as been an electric one I have used coal charcoal hardwood and I studied with the old Smiths and also I have studied the history of blacksmithing and when it comes down to it for versatility gas is probably the best. But you can never forget the old charcoal they work real well, but then again it does take more skill to be able to do it without a lot of the other equipment that you're using

@UKBladeshow Жыл бұрын

Agree. I’ve never really used the equipment and setups you’ve mentioned but they sound very interesting!

@andyc750 Жыл бұрын

have to point out here that the greatest historic blades ever made if they were heat treated were done in either a coal or charcoal forge very successfully, the temperature controlled part is very modern and prior to these inventions people were using their knowledge and hard earned experience to make blades for every occasion including every war pretty much up to the middle of the last century

@GemAppleTom Жыл бұрын

It’s true that skilled blade smiths can do amazing work with surprisingly crude tools and our ancestors were certainly not imbeciles. But it’s also true that those great historic blades are the ones that survived. We don’t have the blades that were rubbish or broke in battle… because they were rubbish or broke in battle and weren’t kept. Modern steels and equipment doesn’t necessarily make for better blades but it does mean even a modestly skilled smith can make repeatably good blades once the best practice is found.

@andyc750 Жыл бұрын

@@GemAppleTom actually if you look around there are literally thousands of surviving old blades in museums and collections, very surprising when you look into it just how much is left, and the point being things were made very successfully for a very long time without the apparently essential modern tools and methods

@GemAppleTom Жыл бұрын

@@andyc750 Thousands of surviving blades I can believe. Even tens of thousands. But how many were made in total over the centuries? Hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions? How many were attempted but thrown away before they were finished because it warped too much or cracked in the quench? It’s an example of survivor bias. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to make an excellent blade with crude equipment - museums prove that point - and I don’t think anyone is calling modern equipment essential (unless your customers require you to do thermal uniformity surveys or similar). But if you want consistency and repeatability you need better than the human eye’s ability to guess temperature by colour or the ear’s ability to work out how much slag is in steel by hitting it with a hammer. A highly skilled and experienced smith can do pretty well but anyone else will produce more scrap than blades without modern equipment especially with the newer grades of steel. A basic plain carbon steel is far more forgiving compared to a tool or stainless steel.

@andyc750 Жыл бұрын

@@GemAppleTom and how many modern blades will last do you think? Not many as stamped out or cut out by laser, ground on a machine to a programme means they are soulless and have no individuality, no way will I ever go over to all the modern tools and machines, and besides if everyone did that then another old skill would be lost forever, and to add to that nowhere near the amount of blades are made now compared to centuries gone by and they are not used in the same way now, they are a less used tool now rather than a weapon or an essential carry everywhere all the time tool that was hard used and damaged and disposed of

@GemAppleTom Жыл бұрын

@@andyc750 The stainless ones will last a pretty long time… I’m not criticising anyone for using old fashioned methods or discouraging anyone from trying them. I don’t think it makes economic or business sense to avoid modern methods but for a lot of blade makers that’s not the point. I don’t for a moment think I’ll make a more consistent blade than a fully worked up production line but I still want to (eventually) get a forge of my own so I can bash metal like my family has done for at least 6 generations. EDIT: it doesn’t make business sense unless your business model is selling hand made knives of course…

@shaungreen679 Жыл бұрын

i do use a gas forge, ive had no issues so far, but when i need to heat treat damascus ill ask andy from cuttlebrook to help me out as he has a kiln

@UKBladeshow Жыл бұрын

Hello mate! Thanks for the feedback! It can be used for sure - but as you may know some type of steels can be trickier to heat treat than others and that’s when a more controlled equipment may be necessary. Cheers Shaun!

@shaungreen679 Жыл бұрын

@@UKBladeshow i mainly use 80crv2 which is very forgiving

@UKBladeshow Жыл бұрын

80crv2 is definitely an easy steel to work with for sure!

@davidmedd8573 Жыл бұрын

Don’t do this, buy this from us instead. Ya not biased at all.

@UKBladeshow Жыл бұрын

Hi David. Sorry to hear you feel this video is biased. This video is a 4-series part of a comparison of heat treatment systems. None of these systems are being sold by the author and purely for educational purposes from an experienced metallurgist.

@tobiashangler Жыл бұрын

Hello David, sorry you feel it's biased - it probably is biased, because I like fancy heat treating equipment and am a perfectionist when it comes to HT. My goal was never to sell anything here. I just want to offer a comparison about the pro's and con's from my point of view as I did a lot of research on it...

@tobiashangler Жыл бұрын

...and full disclosure - I've used a gas forge for heat treatment for years when I was doing this as a hobby. But the quality of my knives was fluctuating way too much for my personal taste. I am sure I would have gotten better at it over time and with a different gas forge - but once I switched to an electric kiln my results where instantly much more consistent and I could start optimizing my heat treatment instead of worrying about it.