Re-hardened inexpensive chisels vs "good" chisels

[John C Cox]

I wanted to circle back around to this thread a year later with some things I have learned...

1. The Buck Bro's chisels I rehardened were all very chippy after this. Even when I tempered them back softer.. I have been unhappy with their performance - as sections of the edge can flake right off.... Compare this to ONE single Buck Bro's new chisel I received which was very very hard out of the pack (I estimate in the Rc 62 range vs their typical at Rc56 range). That hard factory chisel is quite hard but very tough and holds up well on the wood without chipping. Since this road leads nowhere for me - I am done fooling with these for now....

2. I finally figured out that the Cheap Chinese "Chrome Vanadium" Harbor Freight chisels problems are because of being extremely shallow hardening even though the carbon content appears to be there... A typical brine quench of a cup of salt in about a gallon of water (give or take) only fully hardens them around 1/32" deep... This is a problem because they run almost 1/4" thick... Of course the obvious consequence is that a good round of prep to get them ready can burn right through the hard layer into mush.... And that's how I figured it out.. I ground some warp out and hit mush...

Onwards and upwards... Next item of business - can I figure out how to get them to harden more deeply....

This may point to some of what George was getting at but never said outright... Heating up a little past non-magnetic and quenching to reset the heat treatment assumes they were properly heat treated in the first place... And if they simply started with a fully annealed/spherodized structure with no normalization, induction heat, and spray quench... They may not have gotten the crystal structure into the right form to take hardening properly.... Thus their strange behavior...

[ken hatch]

I know different strokes for different folks and all that rot as well and it is good to post about things that blow your skirt as well as things you question. So good on all y'all tool players, I enjoy reading your posts and sometimes they can be enlightening. Here's the question, other than mucking around fooling with tools.....Why? There are very good tools to be had for little more than the cost of the cheap ones and tons of time to saved. In the end you have wasted time and money. BTW, when you are older than dirt time is much more important than money because like that roll of TP when you get near the end it sure goes fast.

Anyway, I get a kick out of 'em in a head shaking way and of course YMMV.

ken

BTW, I wanted to see how many cliches I could get in a single post and still make some sense. I did ok.

[John C Cox]

Why? Because it's there of course. . And because they are "Sunk cost"... They are basically useless to me as chisels as is... So if I can get something better out, I win... And if I wreck them - I have lost nothing because they already aren't useful as chisels..

And perhaps I might also have and ulterior motive behind trying to sort out how to properly through-harden these low alloy water hardening steels...