doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion Classic & Custom Single Barreled Sporting Rifles @ doublegunshop.com Secret Handshake Chisels

1095 and O-1 are not the same steel.
If you heat O-1 red hot and then just let it cool in air it will harden. Not as hard as if cooled in oil but hard it will be. You can also cool in water but you risk it stress fracturing.

Annealing is always done by heating the steel red hot and slowly cooling by burying the steel in a bucket of lime (or wood ash).
In my humble experence O-1 and 1095 are effectivey hardened, tempered and annealed in like manner.
I do buy Starrett ground stock for springmaking and also have a small box full of assorted sizes and thicknesses of annealed 1095 given to me be an oldtime Tool & Die maker when he retired. Surely a lifetime supply of tool steel for springmaking, but is is all flat sheet stock and not particularly suited to making chisels and scrapers in qualtity.

Have been buying new old files for some time, whenever I can find them. I agree the quality and steel of the new stuff is lacking. Seems to be a big drain on old files stock for the custom knife makers, just after the steel. Filing is also a lost art!
Best,
Craig

The comment regarding some of the old timers teaching the new guys brought to mind a similar situation on my old job. Most of the old timers where I worked were very reluctant to show the new guys how things worked and how to operate the various pumps. Three of us were just out of the navy and about the only difference between a marine plant and a stationary one is very simple. One moves through the water and one does not. A pump is a pump and most must be started a certain way. When the old guys retired the new guys became the old guys. Frank