Quote:
Originally Posted by Ultramaroon
I'm fascinated by the balancing act between hardness and toughness but I'm just a tourist. You're the real deal; a modern-day blacksmith.  |
Like most things, I know enough to get me in trouble. Itchi knows some about this too making knifes. To get hardness you heat up to get the desired lattice structure which also puts the carbon atoms from face center cubic to body center cubic trapping the carbon. Then you quench, but these lattice structures are under a lot of internal stress so you temper. Tempering releases the internal stress by putting some of the carbon back into a more even distribution and also reduces the grain boundaries. You will hear some older guys say it "grows the grains together" though technically that is not really the case. You can tell with ferrous steels since they lose their magnetism when it goes BCC. Most stainless steels are already BCC and become magnetic when heated.
Or something like that
