Really looking forward to the heat treatment.
I heat treat my homemade knives in a mini forge with a propane burner. Most of my knives are 01 (local equivalent) tool steel and quenched in old motor oil.
I do always loose a bit of the fine edge and have to post cleanup and sharpen.
Curious as to how that will work with a cutter where once hardened post sharpening will be harder.
Or perhaps it's simply my rather unsophisticated heat treatment technique and lack of fine temp control that causes the edge loss.
I will have pen and paper handy and take notes when you get there.
Niels
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I laughed and laughed. You're going to listen to me on heat treatment?
I use water
on unknown steel
Whew! Got to get a grip here. OK, O1 is oil quench, but you just can't heat a sharp edge to red and lose some metal to mill scale and not lose the edge. Better to leave the edge a bit blunt then sharpen and hone after treating. Even with oil you can initiate some fine cracks when you quench a very sharp edge.
How do you temper?
Is you edge fine after sharpening?
Do you test?
I like to forge cutting tools out of sucker rod (connects the pump jack on the surface with the downhole pump. Good steel, alloys all over the map. If I'm making a knife I forge down a small section and heat treat it. Then I bend it to failure in a vice and inspect it. I've done this several times with a water quench on a 1/8" by 3/8" piece of sucker rod. I get a 30 to 45 degree bend before it snaps and there are fine cracks all over the surface. Hard surface and relatively tough underneath. Good enough for lots of tools.
Do some kind of test on your process to confirm how you like it.
We won't know how I did until tomorrow when I cut some wood with the cutter. However the cutting edge is almost 90 degrees so losing a bit of surface metal will make it sharper.
Last nite and yesterday was a perfect day for burning, had just a little wind. My neighbor to the south of me burned part of his pasture, if I'd had a couple of guys I would of burned my pasture. I'm afraid all the bugs are going to be nasty this year because of the warm winter, burning helps a little with the ticks and fleas.
What do you do with your empty feed bags? I noticed a lot of ranchers/farmers seem to keep them in stacks? I bought a old VW bus and it was used for storage, it must of had 200 empty bags of seed stacked from the floor to the top.
We've got too many neighbors to burn. I have the SE 1/4 of a square mile. My neighbor has the NE 1/4 of the same square mile. The west half has been sold off. About ten years ago one of his neighbors just west of his NW corner let a trash fire get out. We had a light south wind so I drove over to the place to ask the fire department to let it burn. My neighbor was there telling the fire department to back off. When the lady who started the fire found out who we were she started apologizing to us both. We were trying to tell her if they would let it burn far enough south we would light the south end of my place and let it rip north clearing out underbrush and roasting ticks. The fire department was having too much fun saving the world to listen to us and the kind lady could never grasp that years ago we used to burn the square mile when there were only three owners and wanted to burn again. We've not burned since then. Tried one time and so many neighbors came running to help and couldn't understand that we have given up.
You can't have my feed sacks.
The feed mill I use (Stockman's in Pawnee, if you can't figure it out) used to give me $0.25 per sack discount if they refill a used sack. Lot's of guys have their sacks refilled. I shoot for six times, four rows of holes on each end and they are worn out. Usually after five times. You can make big bucks if you are careful to not tear up tattered sacks. I only have 39% resacked. I buy everything else in new sacks so they have a label stitched on them. Then those get used for 39%. It's hard for me to part with the old sack friends just because they are worn out. Like me.
Andy, Must say that I am really into agriculture. I do like to eat and the food does not start out in a canning factory.
A good farmer is a good business man and knows better than to bet the farm with their decisions. It would be good if more business men understood how a small farmer manages their business.
Making your own tools - great. You have surely added to the work you can do on you own projects.
Dwight
If you make a few tools along you can have what you want. I enjoy using tools I have made.
Glad to hear you like agriculture! Corporate business doesn't worry about betting the farm, their goal is to maximize shareholder return and they will take chances that eliminate shareholder value rather than enhance return.
Farmers, on the other hand, own more land than they can justify economically. A farmer can own a million dollars in land and work sixty hour weeks to make a modest income. They have to want to farm. If they bet the farm and lose it then they can no longer have fun farming. Even though they would earn more money with no investment working a job for someone else.
You know the farmer that won the lottery. They asked him what he planned to do now. "Guess I'll just keep farming until it's all played out".
