Thread: HT of Aldos W2
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Old 01-02-2017, 10:58 AM
Doug Lester Doug Lester is offline
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I think that the reason you are not getting your W2 coupons as hard (brittle) as the 1084 is that you are not cooling them quickly enough due to the wrong quenchant and/or the coupons are too thick to harden. Remember that W2 is low hardenability and any coupon between ~1/8"-1/4" just won't cool fast enough to convert to martensite or will only partially convert to martensite with the rest being pearlite.

The quenchant has nothing to do with grain size. You are getting the steel too hot for too long. A longer soak before quenching will only aggravate the problem of grain size. It will also aggravate the problem of retained austenite. W2, as well as O-1 are hypereuticoid steels the aim in austenizing these steels is to only put part of the available carbon into solution and that's difficult to do with a gas forge. You need to restrict yourself to friendlier alloys such as 5160, 1075, 1080, 1084, or 80CrV2.

Doug


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