From material originally posted by Clay Spencer.
Clay makes most of his handled tools for use under the treadle hammer from ball peens. Top tools include fullers, flatters, swages, center punches, curved hot cuts-many radii, cold cuts, punches and many varieties of special shaped tools.
- Forge above cherry red and below yellow.
- Don't heat too fast or too hot. Some real hot ones can come apart on the first blow.
- Normalize them, quench in water (not cold water) and draw temper to blue. The head which is to be struck is left soft from the normalizing. Do not grab the hot head with round or V jaw tongs, you can quench and harden it by cooling from the tongs.
- Normalize by heating just to nonmagnetic, not 200° above, and set aside until cool to touch. Heat slowly and just as it becomes nonmagnetic, quench the tool edge (usually in water) and about an inch of stock above the edge.
- Shine the surface above the edge and just as blue gets close to the edge, cool in water to stop the tempering process (this is not quenching).
- If any of the tool is above a black heat at this time, do not put that part in water. Put 1/2" of water in a can and stand the working edge in the water, let the rest cool slowly.
- Check the hardened edge for hardness with a file, It should just barely cut or maybe skate across the metal.
- Check the struck head to make sure that the file cuts it easily, otherwise it is too hard.
For hot cutting tools, it probably isn't worth the effort to quench and temper.
You must always normalize or anneal any tool you have forged.
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