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I recently read through some data while on social media about normalizing techniques and the amount of soak time and the ideal temperatures needed for various steel carbon levels. I have never employed as much soak time for the normalizing cycles of my blades as I do for the H/T and would appreciate some input about this. This new data suggested soaking approximately an hour per inch of thickness before air cooling and gave some temperatures needed for various steel carbon levels for normalizing them. This has me wondering if I could be getting a more complete normalizing.

The last time that I tested anything to destruction I had good grain size but this recent data has me wondering if I could do better and would appreciate some viewpoints.

Thanks.

Gary

There is always the told adage, if it ain't broke...

Industry does HEAVY forging, like metal movement, in one heat, that we can barely imagine. This is also done on all kinds of shapes and cross sections. We have a fairly simple flat shape in around 1/4" sections, it doesn't take much to get the job done. If you are having distortion issues or inconsistent heat treatments later on you can adjust you times but, once again- if it ain't broke...

This can change with chemistry, but most of our steels are pretty simple. Normalizing is all about going from a mixed chaos to a homogeneous uniformity, the higher temperature gets you there quickly, but the evenness of heating and cooling is more important than the time in a 1/4" section.

As always, when encountering what appears to be conflicting data from industry, I go to the steel for the answers, I have plenty of samples setting next to my metallograph right now that deal with this very subject, I feel they are much more reliable than my humble opinions could be.

Thanks, Kevin. I appreciate it.