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Old 01-29-2020, 02:56 PM
Doug Lester Doug Lester is offline
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Location: Decatur, IL
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If you are thinking about forging D2, if it is D2, you will run into problems. From Jim Hrisoulas' book, The Master Bladesmith, it needs to be forged at yellow to bright yellow and even then it will pretty much laugh at your efforts because it is red hard. It will also need a high temperature oven to harden, as pointed out by Ray, to austenize before air quenching. In that last read that you can't really normalize it but you could do a sub-critical anneal. You have to heat treat D2 right or you end up with large carbides, causing sharpening problems, and retained austenite (the high regulated high temperature oven again) and possibly a talwar of liquid nitrogen.

It won't take long for that "free steel" to become awfully expensive. Buying a known carbon will probably end up cheaper in the long run.

Doug


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Last edited by Doug Lester; 01-29-2020 at 02:59 PM.
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