A newbies guide to annealing and tempering

[pickmonger]

Tempering metal will make it harder and more resistant to bending. Conversley annealing metal will make it softer and easier to bend and shape

Both techniques, combined with selecting the best metal stock for your picks, can help you to fine tune your tools to something far better than commercially available.

Ideally, we would purchase the best metal stock available, and not need to
temper or anneal it. However, thats not always possible, therefore by using these two techniques we can significantly improve less than ideal metal stock.

I was hoping that Romstar might be able to find the time to whip up one of his tutorials, explaining the basics of practical tempering and annealing for the budding lockpick maker.

Of course if anyone else had done this and can contribute, that would be most helpfull.

[Shrub]

I have written many guides on this and there are a lot of threads that cover it, if memory serves there are at least 2 main threads on this with one of them written by me and the other by someone else,

It may be worth looking them up and adding the links here or we simply go over the same ground again,

The most useful thing is for noobs that are grinding hacksaw blades to hot and need to reharden them,

[Romstar]

Shrub is right, it has been covered, but........

I will see what I can come up with.

I'm not going to just fire something out my rear though. I will take the time to mabe do some pictures, and actually try some different techniques so I can recomend something that works well using basic tools.

Romstar