this hillbilly's in the bush and today i'm going to show you guys uh i promised a couple guys to show them how to heat treat a knife what i got here is some used motor oil and a uh uh well it's a tomato juice can i've got a blade here that's a one tool steel and a couple other blades uh it's high carbon steel and what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna fire up the torch show you guys how to get a neutral flame a lot of guys some guys may use a carburizing flame and i'll explain what those are later you definitely don't want an oxidizing flame i tend to shoot for a neutral flame because that's basically a neutral flame uh is what you're going to need when you're using an oxy settling cutting torch or if you've got a welding tips on it but this is one thing i can say is in my field of expertise guys because for the past 25 years or most of my life i've been a welder fabricator done a lot of cutting a lot of uh welding stuff like that so make sure you have some safety glasses uh i usually wear shades or something like that but for today i'm just going to go ahead and wash safety glasses what you want to do is you want to make sure your knife you want to make sure you got almost a 90 degree because what's going to happen when you heat this blade up cherry red so where a magnet won't stick to it it's ready to quench in oil on one tool steel what you do is you you drop it down in here and swirl it around a little bit well there'll be a flame shoot up out of there about four to six inches maybe and uh if you had this straight on your hands right over top of it you're gonna get burnt i'm gonna wear gloves but uh well let's get it started here uh i didn't i didn't go up and get a magnet i'll look and see if i can't find a magnet if not i know what color that metal has to reach before it loses its magnetism but and there's all kinds of fancy words that that i can put in later if you guys want to know some technical stuff uh and how it steel changes uh it's molecular structure and all that but uh just for the demonstration this video i'm just gonna get started and see what we got so let me get the torch set up and i'll show you what a carburizing flame a neutral flame and an oxidizing flame looks like give me a minute okay i'm back what you see here i hope the wind don't mess with us too well too much what you see here is what's called a neutral flame uh it looks like it's blurry or something i don't know if this is picking us up a lot but when you got a carburizing plane what you have is that right there see how that feather is coming out on them hips if you have a neutral flame it'll be nice and uh not overly sharp it'll be a good good neutral real hot plane if you have a carburizing flame what you're going to add until we have a carburizing flame and then you want to adjust your oxygen to where it just brings back out so that's the flame and the heat that i'm looking for right there and uh i'll go ahead and set this camera back up and start heating the blade up and talk to you a little bit about on the heating plate uh give me a minute i'll be back okay i'm back let's get to uh heat treating this blade i hope we can keep everything in the camera here a nice windy day today i hope that wind ain't messing with the camera too much but uh basically what you want to do is you want to heat straight down on top of the blade you don't want the blade angled one way or another you want to heat straight down on the blade from the spine down to the edge and the reason you don't want to your blade one way or another if that blade gets twisted one way or another it'll apply more heat on one side than the other and it'll actually work your blade so what you're looking for is a slow heat process and you may be able to see the collar start to change down through there you don't really need to heat treat the whole handle uh you do need to heat treat part of the handle but the whole thing is not necessarily you don't want a real sharp edge right there where the heat treat is either because uh we don't want any kind of a stress crack or a stress line in the metal but slowly but surely by heating this up the blade will get real red hot all the way down through there uh clear down to the tip so let me get some heating here and then uh i'll turn the camera back on and show you about what we got it's real windy today so that's kind of messing with my uh with the way this is heating up so let me get her hot down through there and uh [Applause] now once your blade gets red hot sometimes you can get away with putting it on the flat a little bit especially i have to do it now because my torch tip isn't really big enough for what i'm doing here [Applause] you just gotta heat it evenly now this plate is getting real close to the clinch and this is gonna happen fast because i don't want this blade cooling down [Applause] before i can get it so once i get it close to where it needs to be i'll be heating i'll be throwing it in the oil real fast you can see that mill scale as that blade pulls down it creates a male scale and that's what we're trying to keep from going we're going to heat this blade up as quick as possible without creating a bunch of melt spots on it by getting it too hot in spots okay guys we're almost there [Applause] so [Applause] the reason you want to keep swirling around so that oil is cooling that blade down right evenly you should i should say because if it don't cool it down evenly what you'll end up with with hardened soft spots or you could end up with some kind of stress fracture in the steel now i had a magnet right here but like i say i don't need to when that steel reaches a certain point it'll actually lose magnetism a magnet will not stick to it once it hits that point it is ready to quench in the oil immediately you don't want to mess around or wait too long but just give you an idea that's what they look like whenever they come out pretty nasty now to test these knives this this blade is actually let me make sure it's straight yeah it's straight it didn't warp uh to test these knives i what i usually do let me see here i don't know if i can show you but it's straight uh i go up and i get me a file and i rake across that blade because right now this steel is harder harder than a pile and a file won't cut it uh this is just the first part of heat treating a blade that the next part is to stick it in an oven and bring it up to around 500 550 degrees something like that for about an hour one hour per square inch of metal so this blade will probably soak for about all three hours at say 500 and i don't know which what rockwell i'm going to take it to yet i'll have to look back up on the specs it's been a while since i've heat treated 0.1 but the higher the temperature of the oven the less rockwell you have and the more flexibility the lower the temperature say like 350 it's going to be way up on the rockwell scale in the 60s but it'll actually be not as springy it'll be brittle so it'll snap what i'm looking for is a good rockwell probably close to 60. maybe 57 to 60 and that way it'll give it a good springiness but yet it uh it'll also hold a good edge so let me go up and get a file and i'll show you guys what i'm talking about okay i'm back uh we can get rid of these vice grips now just show you guys what i meant hear that that that file is skating across there it's not removing any metal as opposed to back here listen to the hear the difference in the sound this back here can actually still be filed let me see if i can get that get that and film see how back here this is still soft steel once it gets up in here it gets a little bit harder and out in here it's real hard it won't eat i mean it's touching the surface but it ain't it ain't doing nothing it's just uh skating across it so that tells me that the heat treat was successful and that we've got a good hardened blade right now now guys right now is when you do not want to sit here and drop this or smack this with a piece of steel i could probably take these vice grips right here and probably just go crack and it is break that blade right off that blade is just like a file now it's real hard and real brittle so i hope you guys might have learned something there and uh like i said there was a couple people that wanted to that had some blades that they wanted to heat treat and yet they didn't uh they didn't know how so i hope that hope that shows you a little bit now there's other ways you can do it you don't need a uh forge or a torch you can actually build your fire and get some forced air onto it and you can go that direction but the way i've done all my knives and i've made quite a few over the years i used to make them and sell them up in columbus but uh the way i've done them all including this one here that i'm carrying this is a uh elephant ivory and it's a 01 tool steel and it's a nice little knife it's got fancy pins on it there's no liners in it but real comfortable knife a little bushcraft knife that here recently i just started carrying because i don't have a neck knife right now as you guys have noticed i hardly ever go anywhere without my neck knife and now i don't have one so that's what these other blades are for uh these blades over here are probably going to be a his and her neck knife for me and the wife as you can see they're they're a pretty small little blade and uh it's kind of like a scandi grind uh and of course our tang so the this will get put back in something bone antler uh osage orange something but my wife she has a mora knife for a neck knife and those knives are a little bit big so i made me one made her one the other one that got sent off to a real nice lady up north and josie i hope you really appreciate that knife as much as i have and hopefully these knives will turn out as good as the one you you you're going to receive here in the next few days because uh i really miss that little knife but i'm going to go ahead and get these when heat treated and i'll probably wrap up this video i'm probably won't show these here same process you just heat them up cherry red and quench them in the oil and then i've got to take these back home and stick them in the oven along with this one and uh get these uh tempered back down what's called tempering or drawing the hardness back and uh so like i said i hope you guys enjoyed the video hope you might have learned something there a little bit uh and thanks for watching and until next time we'll see y'all later