Thread: San mai style skinning knife build

Happy with the first grind, its on to the heat treat and temper. @Mikey-p warned me that the heat treat on this type of forged steel can be very risky, the different metals heat and cool at different speeds which can cause cracks, deformation and delamination. His advice was to just heat the 1084 edge and not the whole blade to cherry red.
So this is what I did, I got the first 15mm of the cutting edge glowing red with the gas torch and plunged it into hot canola oil leaving the upper spine out.





It worked great and I was relieved to see no warping or delamination.
It was nice and hard on the cutting edge and a file just skated over it without biting.
Next I gave it a quick polish with sand paper to indicate the colour while tempering.
It took 50 mins at 200 deg in the oven then air cooled to temper just right.