Hello my friends I hope you're doing
great, today we are going to tackle a problem you remember my power hammer dies that i brutally
modified a while back, they are pretty soft I'm not sure if it shows up on camera here but there
are a lot of small depressions and dings and stuff and we need to take care of that. To be honest this is not a huge surprise I used a saw to cut into hardened
material, that shouldn't be possible Although power hammer dies are not typically very
hard, using a saw to cut something off.... it should not been possible Also, I believe this is 1045 steel, and i came up with that after some research and spark testing and 1045 steel is the surface hardening steel and that means that only about 10 or 15 millimeters gets hard on the surface the core inside is still soft and by removing those 10 or 15 millimeters like i did here... that's of course not very good - you expose the soft core So the project for today is to reheat treat
them and make them usable again! Let's go Here you probably can see
the damage a bit more clearly I will now clean them off, degrease them,
and lightly sand off all the depressions... ...before we go into the new kiln To the grinder Grinding done! It's a bit rough
but that's fine for now I think we are ready for the heat treat, but i want
to point out one thing With just a little bit of bad luck this all can go horribly wrong Look at all the sharp corners here, especially
the inside ones like this They are stress risers and they can actually
cause a crack during the quench The quenching puts a tremendous amount of stress
on the material so let's hope for the best And here I've found a pair of
tongs that i think will work It's quite heavy skip, yeah Rramp up.. no! I want it to heat up as
fast as possible so we skip the ramp And we are going to use 850C. That's the
hardening temperature for c45 or 1045 steel and .. wait a minute, okay. Hold!
So I want the kiln to reach 850 as fast as possible and i want it
to hold at that temperature start I'm excited and a bit nervous I hope it goes well i will need a lot of water to quench this after about one hour and 20 minutes the kiln is up
in temperature. 850, and the pieces are on par with that Good! and now it's time for them to soak for
about half an hour. Then it's time for the quench there goes nothing funny sounds I think i will have to change some
of the water. It's becoming quite warm I will put it here in the
vermiculite until we have the right temperature in the
in the kiln again for tempering okay let's do number two Okay, I think we're done there Now we will need to let this cool down a bit I want to do the tempering at about
330C I think. I'll program that Okay, this is taking a while so
I'm placing them here for a while Over the years I've learned that you should never
let a hardened piece sit and cool down completely ...after the quenching. To 50 or 60 degrees
is okay, then you need to go to tempering I've actually heard stories about
people who left hardened pieces overnight and came back the next morning and
found them cracked! That's a hard lesson learned So remember, after quenching - temper
immediately! So i did a bit of a mess here No worries it's just water! 1045 steel is a
water hardening steel. It can be quenched in oil also but the hardness will suffer a bit from it,
and the choice between water and oil? It's all dependent on the alloy! So the type of steel you use, dictates
the quenching medium I get a lot of questions about that. Water, oil,
water, oil, what's the difference? but in reality, it's the steel that decides. It's going down here as you see,
but I changed my mind here... I will start at 300C, I think, and see how that
turns out. You can never go back you know No! It's now the next day! As you saw, I used
the wire wheel to clean off the scale and the grinder to to get a smooth nice surface
again Last night we left the dies for tempering ...300 degrees, and i left them there for about two
hours Tempering is an absolutely essential step in the heat treating process First you harden something by quenching and
it becomes really really really hard and brittle Almost like glass. To make the material usable for different applications you use the tempering to control how tough
or how hard you need the material to be and for all modern alloys you should be able to
find a chart, where you can see the relationship between the tempering temperature and the hardness For 1045 steel or c45 steel as we have here tempered to 300 degrees celsius, that should give
us a hardness of about or between 45 and 50 hrc rockwell harness Yeah, to help me verify the hardness here, I have got myself a set of hardness testing files From TSUBOSAN, made in Japan and here we have six files in hardness
ranging from 40 to 65 and how you use these? You just start with the hardest one,
see if that marks the surface if it does... ...continue down. Use the next one, until
you reach a file that no longer touches the surface Then you know that you are in a hardness range I hope that makes some sense We probably could start with 55 here
since i'm pretty sure we are below 55 and that definitely makes a mark we go down to 50 not that prominent but still leaves a mark
on the surface for sure. Let's go down to 45 this shouldn't touch the surface much. No! It doesn't! that's pretty cool so the 45 does not mark
the surface but the 50 does then we have a hardness
between 45 and 50, and that is precisely what i want Let's see if i can get them back onto the hammer this is a quite nifty little lock for the wedge it should hold the wedge in place so it can't fall out Roughly in place! Let's see how the alignment is Perfect alignment! Great! Let's do a little test run! Wow, it's been a while since i forget any play buttons It took me three tries to get the right amount of material this one turned out pretty good Some of you will certainly remember that I
made these for my 100k subscriber celebration Feels like it was yesterday! Obviously not! I think the dies performed as expected
No issues so far! ...only forged 3 play buttons... but time will probably tell how
well they will hold up. I hope they are good!! Anyway, thanks for watching and
if you want to grab one of these ...play button key chains Be sure to check out my my patreon page
where I have made them available! Thank you, and see you next time!!
