OT - Quenching steel ala 'Forged in Fire'

OK...I know this reality TV. But in any case....whenever I see these guys quenching a blade to harden it, they put the blade into oil kinda slowly then pull it out almost right away.

In my limited experience with quenching, I seem to recall that you kinda should get the metal submerged 'fast' and leave it a good while, at least until it is warm and not hot.

So are these guys doing it all wrong or is it just TV tricks? Or am I wrong?

Hello GregSY
Are they making an Ulfberht?

I think they are trying to harden and temper the blades in one shot. Not really a great way to do things, but they are on a pretty tight timeline IIRC. Isn't it like 3 hours to forge complete and harden the knife blade?

theater is my guess

The show is not about blacksmithing. The show is about drama and entertainment, they just use the hot metal and fire to help hold your attention. Kinda like cop shows aren't about shootouts, car chases, or blood, but there would be few watchers without those things.

My wife won't let me watch the show, as I just can't be quiet about the continuous screwups and incorrect oral diarrhea. The show has also helped drive the price of blacksmithing equipment so high few can afford to try the hobby.

On relatively short sections (not anything like a sword) you can in fact harden and temper in one operation. Let's say you were making a chisel as an example. If you quench it about 2/3 of the length the part not quenched (the shank) will still be red hot. If you didn't use particularly nasty oil you should be able to watch the colors run due to the residual heat in the shank. When the desired temper color is reached then you quickly quench the whole thing thoroughly, swirling it around to cool it as fast as you can. If you can't see the colors run then you have to polish it a little with a hand full of very course steel wool and then you can see the color bands as they move to the business end. It takes a little practice to learn not to quench it too much where the tempering heat will not make it all the way or quench it too little and the colors run so fast you can't stop the process. I agree that most of what they do is for show. You certainly could not harden and temper in one step doing what they are doing. If they wanted to finish the blade in one step they would only quench the cutting edge and leave the back soft. Chunking just the cutting edge into something like a watermelon or gourd would be a lot more effective. Alas this would not be nearly "showy" enough. Got to have a lot of smoke and fire to make it interesting.

The one dude who is missing teeth and is suppose to be some martial arts expert,when he stabs the dummy and says "It will Kill" makes me sick. You would think if they made enough money on the show he could go to the dentist. I watch it though...lol..about as real as Gold Rush and Oak Island...lol Hey up here in MN and it's 30F below, not much else to do when your 67...lol

Blacksmithing wearing a T-shirt ??????
What are they thinking

Peter

Wearing a T-Shirt, and a Kilt, now that is BOLD. Nothing like hot sparks on your shins.

Myself,I always thought the forging furnaces side by side, would have lite up someone by now.

It seems like most of the Knife makers are overall Hacks, few craftsman at all. But the good ones really stand out.

Gotta go back to work, on my sword made from discarded Gunpowder cans.

I think the quick dip and removal in the oil might be to check on warping. There is a brief amount of time warps can be corrected at that stage. I have never tried it but do get plenty of warped stuff.

gbent said:

The show is not about blacksmithing. The show is about drama and entertainment, they just use the hot metal and fire to help hold your attention. Kinda like cop shows aren't about shootouts, car chases, or blood, but there would be few watchers without those things.

My wife won't let me watch the show, as I just can't be quiet about the continuous screwups and incorrect oral diarrhea. The show has also helped drive the price of blacksmithing equipment so high few can afford to try the hobby.

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Prices where past that point before the show.LOL That said I am sure glad I am out of that side of the biz.

I have been in the knife making industry for 15 years now and what I have seen on the show the few times I have watched it is pretty true to how things are done in most shops I have been over the years.

The quenching of the blade really only takes a fraction of a second to get past the noise of the curve to hit full hardness. If the blade comes out smoking like crazy it is likely fine but if it catches fire on the way out of the oil they missed the mark. That said the guys are usually behind the ball and under a lot of pressure (clock) by the time they get to heat treating the blades. Many mistakes are made here on the show and the judges do a pretty good job of stating so when they see it happen.
FYI I do know the blades do get tempered after the quench but it is not part of the show.

I will say the guys on that show make it look way easier than it is and for those guys, I tip my hat. That said I know some great "blacksmiths/bladesmiths" like Chris Marks that have been on the show and completely fell apart on the show. Chris is a true old school master Blacksmithing too. Many great smiths have done the same on that show.

With the above said Yes it is TV but I honestly believe they do a good job at keeping it real 95% of the time. Yes, it can and does come across as cheesy sometimes but that is purely done by the Directors imho trying to make it better "TV." The shit they think sells "tv" drives me nuts and often ruins these type of shows for me.

Martempering - Wikipedia

and looking for warp would be the real reasons to do so.

But there is a lot of showboating going on.

Read the credits, there are several pyro tech in the credits.

As with a lot of these "reality" shows you have to wonder who in the heck watches them. Forged in fire is probably one of the better ones. The reason why there are so many of this type of show is because a lot of people do watch them and they are about as cheap to produce as you can get. No writers, actors guilds etc. Just a camera guy, a sound guy and a bunch of people running around trying to interject drama into mundane situations. "Okay you have ten minutes to wash and dry these dishes!!!"

Hell's Kitchen is another one my wife makes me watch (grin) I wonder how many of us would stand there and have Ramsey call us idiots to our face and not punch him...lol where do they find these supposit chefs or want-to-be chefs ?...lol

OK, thanks....I also seem to recall that we would usually first wrap the part in some sort of special tinfoil while heating it up. Oh well. I did get a kick out of one show where the guy made a really nice looking sword that shattered when they hit a pig carcass with it. Oops.

They temper between segments- I assume they do the show over 2 days.

I like the show, some of the shit they do is pretty challenging- make a blade from a ball bearing and a golf club, lol.

The heat treating is pretty seat-of-the-pants, no temperature control of the forge or the oil- not surprising it's a crapshoot at times.

Some of the testing is brutal- the cow bone chop looks pretty wicked.

I don't know anything about bladesmithing or heat treating but I do know that wearing a cool looking leather hat while working your ass off in sweltering conditions is a good way to come down with a heat stroke. I find the show entertaining because of the dumb stuff but I also learned a thing or two.

gbent said:

The show has also helped drive the price of blacksmithing equipment so high few can afford to try the hobby.

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That's crap...good blacksmithing equipment has been pretty consistently for at least the 15 years I've been doing tool sales. In fact the price has come down in the past five years. Supply is running low, as the old farms auctions that had a forge, post vice and anvil has really dropped.

If there's anything that's driving cost up, it's the hoarding mentality of guys that can never have enough anvils. All my equipment goes on Ebay within weeks of procuring it, except my personal stash of tongs that I use.

Blacksmithing equipment is an easy flip, and most everybody knows it. Before forged in fire it was orange county choppers, and before that, old yankee workshop...everybody wants to think that the hobby or trade would die off and there would be cheap anvils hanging from trees if it weren't for some stupid television show. The truth...you are playing with fire and making a lot of noise, just like the rest of us.

It seems to me that in all those shows production management brings in unrealistic constraints (I've never watched the sword show but most of the gold shows) it's always set up with a competitive structure, this group against that group, this bloated ego against that bloated ego, and that's the back story, (really the main story).
Yes, there is competition in living, but it's not scripted, so that's far from natural. Yes, there are unexpected circumstances, but not inspired in a studio office, they happen within the maelstrom of unforeseen events.
Knowing that takes all the realism out of reality shows and turns them into what they really are, glorified soap operas.
Maybe, as gbent said, no one would watch unless they injected all the school yard ego matches, maybe not all of us do.

Read and re read, and still the stupid errors!

I know a guy who was on the show. He shared that both the timeline and the working conditions were challenging... including ambient temps and ventilation. Some of that was to amp up the competitive aspects of it, and some was poor shop planning/layout.