Here’s one of my little side projects finally coming to fruition. A new heat treat forge that I designed and built in order to gain better control over temperature and atmosphere during the critical heat treatment stage. 

See, the thing about heat treating is that if you do it well, then good for you, you’ve done your job, but if you do it poorly, you render your product inferior at best, or downright dangerous at worst. Heaven forbid someone have a blade fail them in a critical situation.

So I built this thing. The burner assembly has eight separate burners so that I can produce a more even heat distribution within the chamber. Just above the chamber is a baffle that a made out of some insulative ceramic fiber board, upon which I can place the knife while I wait for it to get up to austenizing temperature. The baffle also helps deflect the flames away from the knife, once again to more evenly distribute the heat throughout the chamber. Insulation is just some basic 8# density ceramic fiber blanket. The working depth of this heat treating forge is about 30″, so it will be able to handle some bigger blades. 

Here’s a shot of the burner assebly before I installed it in the forge body

Pretty cool, right? Next steps are to assemble a front door for this thing, and then wire up and install a thermocouple so I can get accurate temperature readings. My ability to judge heat by color is only accurate to +/- 6 degrees fahrenheit and I need single degree accuracy dammit!

Anyway, I gave it its first test run the other day and it performed great. I will post pics of the test subject when it’s completed in the next few days.