[Jean Thibodeau]

This is about the way I managed to edge harden an halberd I made years ago in art class (Scupture class university 1976).

I'm curious to find out if anybody has ever tried this and from Peter or Craig if this is a known or valid edge hardening technique? It seemed to have worked for me, this time! Also as this is a one edged weapon I did not have to deal with trying to get two edges heat treated in one pass.

Also, have any of you made your own weapons using whatever weird materials or methods

HALDERD DESCRIPTION:
Sparth axe or Bardiche that I made using a large piece of tool steel for the blade, a steel prospector pic that I ground into a multispike back hook, and a mild steel tube for a socket.: All welded together.
The shaft is a galvanized steel tube 1 1/4" diameter 5 ' long with a hardwood dowel glued to the inside of the tube: The whole exterior covered by glue saturated cord to hide the steel tube and improve grip. Blade is 17" inches long and 3.5 " at it's widest, rounded where it is welded to the socked tube at the bottom and arching to a sharp point (Sort of parabolic curve). The blade is welded to the back spike at the top and to the top of the tube: Between these two welding points the blade back is 1.5" from the socket tube for about a lenght of 10".

EDGE HARDENING:
I managed to harden the crescent axe edge using a blow torch and getting the edge to glowing red 3" over a drum filled with water: As the edge got to the right heat I slowly lowered the tip into the water and continued to heat the blade 3" above the water to gradually heat and quench the whole thing in one slowmotion continuous move.
Now this resulted in a glasshard edge and a dead soft back, all done in one pass. That this worked may have been pure dumb luck, Used some sort of high speed tool steel that should have received a completely different type of heat treatment!

Anyway, I guess I would have fun learning to use a real forge as I really liked using an acetylene torch and an anvil.

Just enjoyed reminiscing about my fine arts days.

[Craig Johnson]

Hello Jean

Well thats one way to do it I guess

The tool steel you used probably was designed to be heat treated with oil or salt for best results. The water would have shocked it quite well. In essence you have actually done half the process to this piece. It has been quenched but not tempered. The method you used would be a sort of rolling slack quench. A pretty good trick to pull off. The issue you would run into, if the carbon content is high enough, is the hardness could be extreme and very brittle if you where to hit it against something. In the context of normal heat treatment the piece would then be cooked at a tempering temperature to bring the hardness into a working range. If the carbon content is low enough it may be a decent enough slack quench, using a novel method. I doubt I would be clever enough to have thought of it.

I would not be surprised to learn that this type of method may have been used in the past with say large items in the early industrial age where concentrated heat could be controlled well enough to accomplish the process.

In period most pole type weapons I have looked at and the few written up have not been heat treated.

Best
Craig

[Jean Thibodeau]

Craig, thanks for the reply.

I obviously sort of improvised this and just got lucky I guess that it didn't just cause the steel to fissure from the stress and I don't want to give the impression that I know how to do this properly assuming that it is even possible to do it well.

Now you are probably right a tempering would probably be necessary but I wonder if the part of the steel that has been quenched (Already in the water) might not be sufficiently reheated by the part of the blade still being heated about 3" higher to have some sort of tempering effect as heat from the travelling hot spot should be transfered at least partly to the already quenched part.

Now, if this makes sense, doing it at exactly the right speed and heat without any mistakes would be a matter of great skill and experience or beginners LUCK ! One of those thing that works the first time and that might not be be consistantly repeatable. (Still, reheating the whole thing for for stress relief and to soften that glass hard edge would probably have been wise at the time.)

This was some sort of die tool steel at I assume a high level of carbon. Now if I ever tried using this against a hard target the edge might well chip badly but the soft back should at least keep it together.


Oh, one factor that MAY have softened the hardness a bit is that I welded the whole thing together after I did the heat treating of the blade so some reheating may have "accidentally" tempered the edge a bit.

A previous post mentionning a technique of quenching the blade and pulling it out quickly so that residual heat would temper the blade sort of made me wonder if what I did was using a similar principal.

I appreciate your imput on this and I am sure that you know at least 1000 more about this than I do as one project does not equal years of experience working with steel.

By the way I did it this way because I had no way, with the tools available, to heat more than a couple of inches of the blade at any one time. With a real forge or furnace I might have attempted a more conventional technique.

I'm sure that the proper medium to quench the steel I used was probably oil, so here is another variable, using water that makes the results I got pure luck.

Oh. my Halberd weigth is about twice that of my nice A & A Poleaxe that I got from you. (A real boat anchor ......... LOL)

[Andrew Winston]

Jean,

This is, essentially, how a differentially hardened edge is created on many Southeast Asian weapons. The smiths in Thailand were fairly skilled at the technique, and often even created a "hamon".

Best,
Andrew