Blacksmithing for Beginners - The Best Cold Chisel 

this is an amazing tip! gonna buy a box of salt for the shop now

@@Cratercitysmith another tip that goes hand in hand with that one... is to get some blue Didymium filter lenses to put in a pair of goggles to slip on whenever you look directly into the forge. It's a glassworking thing, and I'm amazed that blacksmiths and bladesmiths haven't adopted it. We only glance into the forge for a couple of seconds at a time, but it adds up over the years and all that IR and UV high frequency light completely wrecks our eyes with cumulative damage, because the entire lining of the forge is radiating it, not just the burner, not just a single point like with a torch. You don't need a welding hood or a 14 shade... just a blue Didymium lens for your goggles. It's a wise and inexpensive PPE purchase.

Huh...gonna have to remember both of these tips o.o

I've never heard of that. That's really cool

DF may have known. But I did not. Thank you for the tip.

It's usually easier to start with the chisel a little hard because if the edge chips all you need to do is go to a darker (softer) temper colour. However if the chisel starts off too soft and the cutting edge deforms then you will need to totally redo the heat treat to get back to a lighter temper colour.

Thankyou for your constructive feedback, this kind of insight is the best of youtube in my humble opinion.

Technically yes but this works for a lot of applications and if you arent working o. Boxes frequently, you can just set the box on top of the vice and use the vice as the baseplate. Some vices have anvils on them anyway. Or if you want to punch through and dont want to damage your vice or chisel, you can open the vice and set the box on top

That area has lost its temper. If it is localized to just a thin blue line on the cutting edge and you caught it ( cooled it ) fast enough you will be able to grind past that area and get to a section that was not affected by the heat. Otherwise it will be necessary to go through the whole heat treating cycle again.

The makeup of the steel determines whether it is oil, water or air hardening. With scrap steel you will need to test to see what works best. The reason I use springs or crowbars for my tools is because they tend to always be oil hardening ( so far ).

A lot of the time you need to know the alloy youre using, or you can just guess. Some alloys use water, oil, or some mixture of stuff. Car springs are usually gonna be pretty similar i think. I have an app called heat treat that has a database of alloys and their heat treatment processes. Its a really incredible bit of informstion. Thats talking about ideal conditions though. For most purposes, just using oil is a pretty safe bet