Hi nahte123 thanks for watching! Hopefully you found the video useful!

You're very welcome! It was great to work with the likes of Tobias - very knowledgeable, extremely helpful, and makes an amazing alcoholic drink! hahaha

Cheers Rigajykra! It will be another great year for us all for sure! Thanks for watching!

Hey bud thanks again for watching - I hope you enjoyed it! Here's some other link to other KZfaq videos that Tobias shared with us: jtcustomknives: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/mbOpdqqartCVlmQ.html FSB: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ibGYlaeq0NTVeIU.html

Thank you for the lovely compliment! I hope you are enjoying our content we put out to help makers out there!

hey buddy thanks for watching and yes - we have (lots) more Tobias videos coming in the next few weeks! Just in case you fancy binge-watching another excellent knife-making video o making a feather-pattern Damascus, check out this one with Joel Black (UK): kzfaq.info/sun/PLFssspwgISv8GPuCp4SMpQ2_BInVG-0SJ

@UKBladeshow thanks for the heads up I'll be watching that once the bubs goes to sleep ( if I'm lucky enough haha) Stay cool people you keep making them and I'll keep watching them

Thanks Mark! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the series!

Hahaha!

Haha totally biased 😊 I am loving it

Thanks Ben!

Cheers Benjamin! Speak to you again soon! 🤩

You’re welcome 😊

Thanks again McKnife! Have a good weekend!

I basically just use a manifold of small holes on the tube. I played with a couple designs until it worked right but its no big deal in a tube this size.

Great tip - didn't realise that myself but yeah that makes sense. Thanks for watching Tom and speak to you again soon!

Maybe do rudimentary Carburizing but nitriding? Nope.

@@atul2048 I have done it successfully myself, so yes it’s perfectly possible. Carburising and nitriding can both be done quite controllably if you integrate a good gas analyser into the process. Boyle’s Law means it’s not very efficient as far as gas use goes. I’d not want to do a 60hr nitriding process at 500C but a quick nitrocarburising at 580C for 4hr or so is grand.

@@GemAppleTom Hello, using the setup described in the video I would say it's not possible to do nitriding or nitrocarburizing at the austenitizing temperature. Even in ferritic temperature ranges previously mentioned, it is not possible to do efficient nitriding as your room would be filled with toxic/acidic vapors as a few microns diffuse into the kind of alloys you are using. Best to use an airtight system with recirculating systems and a hydrogen potential sensor for a satisfactory result. PS. Pumping nitrogen alone wouldn't result in the nitride layer.

@@atul2048 i was talking about ferritic nitriding and nitrocarburising. If I was talking about treatment in the austenite range I’d have called it carbonitriding (even though the standard nomenclature makes no bloody sense…). Yes, you need good ventilation and a way to burn off the flew gases - something you need with a standard gas nitriding furnace too. I can attest to how unpleasant getting a lungful of ammonia is. Yes, of course nitrogen gas isn’t going to nitride steel - unless it’s ionised as in plasma nitriding. I used a N2/ammonia mix. The N2 isn’t ideal but required to fluidise the sand bed (hydrogen makes the best mixing gas but practically that mean using cracked ammonia). I can assure you it ^is^ possible to nitride in a fluidised bed. It’s by no means ideal, I’ll happily agree - I’d much prefer to use a standard gas nitriding furnace with a decent mass flow controller, hydrogen and oxygen probes but you can do it. And if you are limited in space and equipment, having one furnace that can do hardening, carburising and nitriding is very useful. And exactly that was the situation it was used in - a small contract heat treatment company serving a small customer base where carburising and nitriding were only occasionally required. Edit: I don’t really think nitriding is useful for knife steels in general, certainly not plain carbon steels. I’ve done most of my gas nitriding R&D work on tool steels where nitriding is very useful.

You could… Not sure what the point would be, I must confess. You’d need to modify the kiln quite extensively to let the gas bubble up through the sand and also let it out of the kiln again. Not sure how you’d get the blade into and out of the sand if it’s already in a kiln.

Yes you can, basically you can add the vessel into any electric kiln that can be used upright. Gas and thermocouple come in from the top so thats no problem. You just need to be careful not to touch the electric coila and add a ground wire to the tube to make sure the electricity is killed if it should ever touch the coils.

Heating the sand up does take a goodly amount of energy. Keeping it hot isn’t too bad and once you turn off the gas the sand will cool quite slowly. You can shut it off at night and not need much energy to heat back up the next morning. Maybe not the best choice if you’re smithing as a hobby on the weekends. Quite a sensible choice if you’re full time.

Ditto Tom’s comment. If you’re doing batches all the time, this will be something worth considering. Hopefully the series has given people ideas on pros and cons of various HT systems. As you can see, even Tobias’ favourite system (this one), isn’t for everyone either. But it’s good to know what options are available in case makers do want to level up their equipment to improve their blade performance, grain refinement and general workflow or process efficiency.

It is a useful technology. I’m a bit surprised an Austrian is using it,though. It’s far more common in the UK than anywhere else in the world as far as I knew. I cut my heat treatment teeth with a fluidised bed so glad to see it getting some love. I don’t think you’ll have too much of a problem with your clay. The sand isn’t getting blasted at the surface with any kind of speed. Embrittlement? I’m aware of hydrogen embrittlement as a problem for some steel. If that’s what you mean then using argon or even nitrogen shouldn’t cause that particular issue.

@Tom Collins damn thanks dude answered all my questions. Hmm interesting it's popular in the UK I woulda figured it would've been more popular in Asia with industrial scale set ups like salt baths. Good to know on the clay. I know with salt baths you gotta bake it thoroughly before and it messed up the pH balance anyways. Gonna be doing katana, but also recreating Howard Clark's famous L6 bainite heattreatment but on a different steel. Martensite edge bainite body with a hamon. Recently figured out 3 ways to do it though 1 requires some skill and math and the right steel selection, other one is similar but a little bit better due to clay at least insulating the spine to prevent martensite formation. Other is completely different and formed the reverse direction of the others. But gonna have to play with which one I like best. Yeah was worried about potential gas embrittlement or potential issues with various sands used. What's the useful temp range? Is it possible to austemper or marquench in them or does a salt bath still win for that? For euro or spring tempered swords trying to decide between austempering or marquenching might offer both options. Low temp harder lower bainite might be useful in knifes and swords where you need slot of toughness but wanna keep your edges hard. Time trade off might make that costs worth it and trade off some cost for simpler steels being cheaper. Z tuff being one of the few steels I could see being able to get as tough and keep high hardness, though it'd have wear and corrosion resistance advantages it's price probably directly trades off even for a long austemper. I mean 60hrc would be overkill for most swords and in 5160 it takes like 90 hours, but in sword size for stock removal you'd probably be close to a grand in steel for some swords alone. Vs less than 200 in 5160. At 53 to 55hrc where more swords run you'd probably cut a few hours off. 5160 probably isn't the best choice though, I think L6 would be like 16 ish hours for sword hardness. Sandbath would make both those operations much safer. Especially the one bainite martensite partitioning treatment. Out of water or oil or a polymer based quench into a salt bath is risky. Part of my company goals are also safety and environmental. Gonna use induction set ups for heating up the sand beds or salt baths. Likely induction heating for forging, albeit only a small amount of that. Recycle waste material and scraps. And run solar panels. Preventing the oxidization issues with salts would likely extend the lifespan of everything in the workshop, especially the heating equipment. And obvious safety benefits. Could even potentially heat the gas supply with waste heat and insulation to help with preventing heat loss in the system. This kinda got me pumped. So much safer then salt baths it seems. Only potential loss is that salt baths actually help with speeding up the quench albeit that can be bad. Thin layer of molten salt works almost like brine does. Not much real study into it but Howard clark and numerous other have noted it. If you were quick you could potentially brush off parts of it to help control rapid cooling or more even cooling but that'd be so much experimenting. Could create a cool hamon, though, without clay.

@@bmxriderforlife1234 You sound like a man with a plan. Good luck. For reasons best known to himself Vinz made me a moderator for this channel so feel free to throw out any questions and I’ll likely see them and answer them if I can. Yes you can use a fluidised bed for austempering and the like very well. You’ll need a couple going at once at the right temperatures though. Fluidised beds don’t ramp up or down quickly.

@Tom Collins haha thank you and still working out some small stuff, but the domestic production stuff has alot more research required then the Asian produced line I'll be doing. That requires some prototyping time though. And testing a few forges. I'd wager the same reason I want certain content creators, researchers and other experts in various things involved. Seems to have the same collaboration mindset I do for making things the best quality possible through cooperation where possible. Same reason despite having kinda figured out the process I'd still like to potentially get Howard clark involved, some little details and such that you can only learn through experience and then willingness to teach. Sweet. Sounds like this should work rather nicely. And yeah already know I'm gonna need a few pots. And various shapes of pot. One needs to be able to technically handle up to 96 inches despite nothing that long actually getting heated though close. Claymores and zweihanders xD thermal mass is also an issue since production scale there will be times multiple blades need to be done back to back quickly. But no risk of off gas kinda cleans up some other issues. Deep enough lip would mean I could have a giant sand band that could handle 5 or 6 blades at once for smaller stuff and the big one could handle 3 or 4. Goes from 3/4 of the biggest ones for each temp range to 2. Man. This channel is seriously becoming probably my favorite very quickly. If my company idea works out I may have to hit up the owner and bring him to Canada and give him a modified version of my grinding jig for video. Required a 3d printer or cnc of being creative but let's you do pretty complex shapes. If you think about grinder tables. All you need if one that can handle fine adjustments to angles. If you print the right shaped jig you can essentially grind both distal taper and edge taper in one bang uber accurately. Looking at certain sharpening systems can even make coming up with custom set ups not that hard or tweaking it to various processes whether hand done or on grinders. Need to test the one idea out but should allow for recreating exact convex grinds over and over. Just gotta tweak it enough people can't just exactly copy it for sword use.

Hey buddy. Thanks for the questions and comments - happy to hear you're finding the series of videos interesting! And yes, happy to take your offer in the future and I'll fly to Canada ;) - Vinz

Yes you could, that would make the system react a bit faster and heat up quicker but it would require a pretty serious induction heater that would probably draw more current than most workshops have available.

I suppose it would be similar to an induction crucible heater.

Hi! Sorry if there was some misunderstanding but this video isn't about WHAT a fluidised sand bed is but mainly what the pros and cons are of this system. I hope that clarifies it! Thanks for watching!

@@UKBladeshow I know, that you just elaborated on pros and cons, and I kind of figured out, what it is - but I think, the video would have been even better, if there had been a 10-30 second long explanation about it in the start. It would certainly give more viewers a chance to understand. Keep it coming, you guys are generally very interesting 👍👍

Hi Little Bear. Thanks for your comment. This is a comparison video of various different heat treatment systems for knives and has pros and cons. We have videos as well of others such as gas forge heat treatment, kiln, and even an induction heater. This video was made to hopefully spread knowledge out there of other HT systems available, as no single system is beat for everything so we thought it’d be a good idea to show newer knife makers what systems are there to be used.

I don’t think anyone is saying that old technology is terrible and and you should only use the new. That’s not the point of the series. However the centuries old knives (I’m sure millions were made but we certainly don’t have millions still around) are the ones that survived because they were well made and didn’t suffer from critical defects. Any blade that cracked during forging because it had a massive inclusion in, any that warped or cracked in the quench, chipped too much during grinding etc aren’t here for us to compare. We can see the successes but not the failures - and without modern methods failures are a lot more likely. I can’t remember if it was this or another of Tobias’ videos where he put it very well “You can’t control what you can’t measure.” That’s what modern technology gives you - control and repeatability. The human eye can estimate temperate by colour to an accuracy of about 100C. A properly calibrated thermocouple can do it within a fraction of a degree. We can control and modify steel production to avoid blade breaking slag inclusions during modern steel making that simply wasn’t possible before. If you want predictable and repeatable results for not one but 100,000s of blades with very little chance of a single failure then you need modern tech. That all said, I’d never tell someone to stop using old fashioned smithing methods if they wanted to. They take a bit more skill and sometimes a bit of luck to get consistent good results with but for a lot of people that’s the whole point of blade smithing and it’s something I can wholeheartedly get behind. For someone like Tobias, however, who is running a business and any failed blade costs him money and wastes time, use the best kit available.