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Aldo’s 52100 is very good steel, but it is very heavily spheroidized for easy machining, you will want to normalize it at 1650°F to increase its responsiveness to heat treatment.
Please forget any plans of improvising a salt bath. I have been working with salts since the mid 1990’s, there are only a handful of us knifemakers who have that many years getting to know them. My setup has always been fairly state of the art and I have almost been killed more than once using them. I really believe that salt baths are a bit on the overkill side for the vast majority of knifemaking applications. With the capital you would expend on a safe and reliable salt bath, you could have a nice oven and a good atmosphere purged oven will get you to most the places a salt bath will, and without the threat of violent, ugly death.
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