A couple hamon question for the hamon guys

[jcoon8283]

When you dry your clay on the knife prior to ht, how do you guys dry, air dry, in the oven etc? Would there be any problem if I were to dry my clay coated knives in the oven at 500 degrees for an hour after normalizing and prior to ht? Between quenching and tempering do you remove your clay from the knife or do you leave the clay on through your tempering cycles? I tried doing a search here and didn't come up with much regarding my questions so I thought I would post them. Thanks for all the help!!!

[Doug Lester]

You can use the clay one wet, at least you can with the thinned down furnace patch that I use, or you can let it air dry, or even oven dry. I take the clay off as soon as I have completed the quench. It's job is done by that point.

Doug

[Ray Rogers]

I've tried it all those ways but I find that letting it air dry slowly for a day or two works best. Drying it in the oven can stick like crazy with Satanite and some other clays and there seems to be a greater chance that the clay will break up. The air dried stuff sometimes has to be chipped off the blade after HT which, IMO, gives it a better chance of doing what you put it on the blade to do......

[jcoon8283]

Well for the most part I was drying mine under a spotlight just to get some moisture out of the clay before ht, but today I tried drying in the oven to speed up the process and give another way a shot. I once read a post here that mentioned (if I only could remember what thread) a guy was drying his knives in an oven for 1 hour at 500 degrees prior to ht, so I thought it would be a good starting point and tried it on two knives. When I pulled them out after an hour at 500 they had a nice blueish/purplish color to them and I'm starting to think that I did something that maybe I shouldn't have. They had been normalized prior to the oven adventure and I have yet to heat and quench them for fear I did something wrong. What do you think, am I safe or did I screw them up?

[Doug Lester]

You didn't hurt the blades. All you did was develop a patina on the surface of the steel. Heating the steel to 500 degrees after normalization will have no adverse effect on the steel.

Doug

[AUBE]

The main reason for drying clay is so the moisture in the clay doesn't flash into steam and blow the clay off the blade during heat treat. So if you use heat to dry clay keeping the temp somewhat low would be a good idea...500 might be a bit much. But if you try it and the clay stays on the blade then thats good enough.

Some clay mixtures you don't have to dry since the steam works its way out without blowing off chunks of the clay.

[jcoon8283]

Well that's the problem I was having. I was getting some separation between the edge of the clay and the knife and I assumed that the inside of the clay was still wet and the expulsion of steam was causing the separation. So I thought drying in an oven might speed up the process over air drying and insure me that the inside of the clay was as dry as the outside.