Been forging about 18 months and just realized I was annealing wrong the whole time

I always just let my steel cool in the forge after a heat but a guy at the hammer-in in Asheville told me that's basically slow cooling not annealing proper. He said you need to heat to critical and then cool really slow in something like vermiculite - is that the right way or is there a simpler method I'm missing?

2 comments

2 Comments

sage_dixon1mo ago

Man I feel that. Did the same thing for my first year, just let stuff cool in the forge and called it good. Then I tried actual annealing in vermiculite on a batch of 1084 and the difference in how it drilled and filed was night and day. You don't have to buy specialty stuff though, I just use a bucket of wood ash from my shop stove. Heat to nonmagnetic, let it soak a minute, then bury it in the ash and leave it overnight. Works just as good as vermiculite and costs nothing.

grantschmidt1mo ago

Oh wow, that brings back memories. I had the exact same experience when I started making kitchen knives a few years back. Letting blades cool in the forge just made them a bear to work with. Once I switched to burying them in a bucket of perlite from the garden center, everything got so much easier. It's amazing what a difference that slow cooling makes, especially on 1084 and 1095. Your wood ash trick sounds like a great alternative, I might have to try that next time I'm out of perlite.