Thread: A woodie with a metalurgy question

Jim, I'm certainly no expert on this but to try and answer several points....case hardening will generally not penetrate as far depending upon a lot of different things...I only mentioned it to draw your attention to the fact that mild steel can be hardened and case hardening is but one way, it's easy and cheap, certainly not rocket science but unless you control all the variables, I can guarantee you won't get the same result twice.....I use it for face hardening small components, have never tried it on edges and wouldn't think it'd be much chop (parden the pun!) as your cutting face will cop all the wear and a case hardened edge would flake easily in my opinion and be next to useless.

Regarding annealing...and I don't want to go off topic here so will keep this quite short...I assume most people on this forum would have annealed at variuous stages and got differing results - I know I have ......you can harden mild steel and subsequently anneal it for temper but regarding copper and it's alloys......it is usually the opposite...you anneal brass and copper to soften from work hardening.....

There are others far more knowledgable on this forum than I who can show you how to harden your cutters while at the same time release the temper so they are not brittle.....case hardening will make the edges brittle.....look nice though, but useless for what you want...

Think I'd second the other posters like Marc and suggest a welder........... hope that helps............Lee