Quality steel and heat treating picks

[FancyPants]

So I've been looking at all the threads that are for the quick and easy DIY picks, but I'm curious if anybody has done any lengthy experimentation with steels of known composition? Nothing wrong with having hacksaw blades, heck, I've used a set of feeler gauges for the longest time, but it'd be nice to have a universal material as "hacksaw blade" instantly throws you into a field of a hundred different manufacturers with their own secret recipes.

I've personally dug myself into smithing/metallurgy a bit, but I'd be lying if I said it was an area of expertise. From knife making, I'd guess to try something like 1090 high carbon, but I have suspected that would be fairly commonplace on the market. 4140 might be interesting, and something quite commonplace. At the same time, I'm not sure if a knife making material would be suitable at all - too hard, not tough enough?

All while on the topic, has there been much history of people heat treating/annealing picks? I can't imagine it would be too hard for a manufacturer to give themselves the edge by purchasing a heat treating oven to just dump 100 picks into a batch for a day to make higher quality picks.

I imagine I'm looking for the smithy on the board

[cuttinedge1]

For starters I have dabbled in the mysterious arts of knife making but I am no expert. The "secret recipes" of some manufactures varies from the "metal" they skim off the top of the crucible and what ever the giant magnet pulls out of the last batch of recycling to quality custom steels. For the most part temper matters more than steel type. If you have any decent steel but you only harden it and don't temper at all it will crack easily. If you temper it too much it will bend easily. Stainless steel would be good because sanding rust off picks every week or so get really old really fast. Try buying a set of picks with lots of hooks and heat treat half with different tempers and leave the other half as controls. Do some tests until they fail and I would love to see the results.

[FancyPants]

It's definitely something I'd like to try myself whenever I get myself a heat treatment oven in the next year or two, not something particularly difficult either I'd think.Test in maximum horizontal deflection as well as vertical breaking strength... Probably going to have to contact Peterson or somebody about a special order of bulk hooks.

It would be interesting to have tests done with picks already out there without any heat treatment to be honest, if nobody has already performed stress tests. I'd have to do a bit of digging to find picks sold in Canada aside from Sparrows. Customs can get a bit touchy with picks, especially when you're living in a province that requires a pick license without a pick license. Those bullies!

[foxyfox]

It's definitely something I'd like to try myself whenever I get myself a heat treatment oven in the next year or two, not something particularly difficult either I'd think.Test in maximum horizontal deflection as well as vertical breaking strength... Probably going to have to contact Peterson or somebody about a special order of bulk hooks.

It would be interesting to have tests done with picks already out there without any heat treatment to be honest, if nobody has already performed stress tests. I'd have to do a bit of digging to find picks sold in Canada aside from Sparrows. Customs can get a bit touchy with picks, especially when you're living in a province that requires a pick license without a pick license. Those bullies!

What 'heat treating oven' are you planning on getting? From what I can tell, I've just read about people just use a propane torch to reach the Curie point, then tempering in a kitchen oven.

With regards to stress tests, I would highly recommend thinking about approaching it from another angle. Steel is a very well characterized and understood material in materials engineering. And there are modeling programs (such as Solidworks) which do finite element analysis, giving you an accurate simulation of how the model will react to stress. For instance, here's a complicated model (compared to a steel strip that is): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t4XPXfjLg8

I spent a couple hours dabbling in Solidworks a long time ago, and it's just amazing. Within seconds you can change the material type, dimensions, and where you place the load. Heck, you can model a pick to be made out of weapons grade plutonium, and see what happens when you place a turbulent elephant on it!

[FancyPants]

What 'heat treating oven' are you planning on getting? From what I can tell, I've just read about people just use a propane torch to reach the Curie point, then tempering in a kitchen oven.

With regards to stress tests, I would highly recommend thinking about approaching it from another angle. Steel is a very well characterized and understood material in materials engineering. And there are modeling programs (such as Solidworks) which do finite element analysis, giving you an accurate simulation of how the model will react to stress. For instance, here's a complicated model (compared to a steel strip that is): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t4XPXfjLg8

I spent a couple hours dabbling in Solidworks a long time ago, and it's just amazing. Within seconds you can change the material type, dimensions, and where you place the load. Heck, you can model a pick to be made out of weapons grade plutonium, and see what happens when you place a turbulent elephant on it!

I'm planning on getting something like what Evenheat offers, just tiny little kilns, more or less. I've got quite a few hobbies that would benefit from a kiln, anyways. From what I know, the critical temperature sits a little higher than 800C for most steels. I can't see most kitchen ovens exceeding 400C, so I'm a bit surprised to hear that people are doing that. It's better than nothing, but that 400 degree drop is quite large. I can possibly see it being done with heavier materials, such as tooling and knives, as they retain a lot more heat inside of them so the cooling is much more gradual, but by the time you heat up a pick and drop it in the oven, I can imagine it being cooled far too much already.

An idea I just had is to potentially doing it the old fashioned way - laying the heated metal on a bed of coals and letting it die down. But coal is not anything I have experience with, so I'd say the idea's already canned

I've never known that about Solidworks - I knew there was quite a bit to it, but if you could test steel compositions with varying heat treatments, that would be phenomenal. I have a few Mech.E friends I should probably bug about that