We will now interrupt the regularly scheduled programming for this Good Old Blades micro podcast. Probably one of the most valuable things I've found in knife making is to do your own heat treating. However, it's not everybody's cup of tea. Um, mostly it's because of the expense of getting everything that you need to do it correctly, right? So in in knife making, there are lots of ways uh to do heat treating, depending on what type of steel you're using. But for most of the stainless steels, uh the complication arises with uh your austenization uh temperatures and holding a constant temperature until you have to quench uh because of the way that um the steel acts uh basically, right? If you want to get more scientific about everything, Laren Thomas has a heat treating book that you can search pretty easily on Amazon or Google, and you can find out just about everything you'd ever want to know about heat treating and the recipes for individual steels. But suffice it to say, um if you're doing tool steels or you're doing high carbon, um, you can usually get away with a forge of some sort and and your and your quench oil. Uh you can even uh do some uh tool steels and high carbon with air, but uh you know that has to be really thin, like a thin cross section. So um you can you can get away without a enough like an actual heat treating oven if you're doing high carbon for the most part. But stainless steels, you have to have the temperature control, otherwise it gets really painful. Um and that's kind of where uh you get into the conundrum of of you know personal versus professional heat treating, because I think it almost goes without saying that uh that professional heat treating is very, very controlled. I mean, you have you have all of the equipment and the processes down pat with a professional heat treater. So the likes of Peter Heat Treating or uh Paul Boss Heat Treating, there's uh quite a few um you know local uh companies that you can search for in uh on Google or whatever and find them, but I really prefer uh Paul Farner uh at Paul Boss Heat Treat because uh they they really know how to do it right and they test multiple times to get within your target um uh rock wall hardness and so on and so forth. But you know, it costs a certain amount per blade. You usually uh benefit from doing more than one knife at a time. So batches are usually the most cost effective, and the turnaround time is um you know, with shipping back and forth and heat treating time, it can be two weeks, right? Um, depending on how how busy uh Paul Boss heat treat is. Where I decided to do most of my heat treating in-house was because of that turnaround time. Yeah, uh, there there is a learning curve to getting good heat treating. Uh, you have to pay attention to the recipes, you have to know your oven really well, it has to be a not glitchy oven that has you know temperature control, and you hold for an appropriate amount of uh of time uh for each steel type, and so on and so forth. In addition, it doesn't really help uh to do uh in-house heat treating on stainless and things like that unless you have a rock wall hardness tester. Um, I know that they make files and other things that you can uh test steel with, but it's not the same as being able to use a penetration test, like a uh you know a rockwall hardness tester to do that. And they're not cheap. Uh, you know, on average, if you're buying uh new from Grizzly, they're over a thousand dollars, I think. Uh if you're buying used, uh you can usually find them under $1,000-ish, but you're running the risk of them not working, and sometimes they need to be calibrated, and not everybody is good at uh calibrating those machines. So uh you kind of you kind of run the luck of the draw on buying secondhand equipment. Um the but again the benefit of being able to personally heat treat is you get to decide on when you want to do it. Now there's a lot of ovens out there. Um Hotshot makes one, um Even Heat makes another one. There's uh Paragon, it's a very popular uh model, and I that's one I use. There's different types and prices, all the way from you know fifteen, sixteen hundred dollars all the way up to four or five thousand dollars. Uh there's um if you for stainless at least, if you don't want to if you don't want to uh wrap all of your blades in um in oxygen resistant foil um in order to keep it from uh decarbing and everything, then you have to use an um uh an inert gas uh evacuated chamber. So basically it has a a valve on it that initially you pump out all of the air from the uh the cavity or the the body of the of the unit of the of the heat treating of it, and then you fill it with an inert gas. And then as you're doing the heat treating, it's going to maintain that pressure and everything uh until you're done with your heat treating uh cycle. And the idea at least is that in in the absence of oxygen, uh nothing will uh decarb. So it's something to think about because uh all of those things cost money. It costs money to buy all the foil, it costs money for the oven, it costs money for quench plates if you're doing um if you're doing air-quenched steels uh over all. Uh you know, your rock wall harness tester costs things, it costs it to calibrate, the electricity to run the heat treating oven costs, and the majority of what is the benefit to you is the turnaround time or the the spontaneity and agility at which you can heat treat things. So, you know, when when you're thinking about it, um there is a lot of benefit to sending uh your material off to a trusted heat treat uh you know company and uh and waiting the amount of time it takes, giving them a target HRC and everything, and you know, getting back blades that are straight, that are heat treated appropriately and tested, and they don't have a ton of uh decarb or any anything on the outside because you know when they're using a Nert gas, it's a pretty clean process, but again, not the same turnaround time. So the cost approximately is between like four and seven dollars a blade if you're doing it in batches. If you're doing one-offs, then obviously it gets a little bit more expensive. It can be upwards of $17 a blade. Uh, it also depends on whether, you know, what the size uh of the blade is, yeah, you know, lengthwise, thickness-wise, everything like that, because those are are kind of factors uh in you sending it off. And I have sent off uh when I first got into heat treating, I sent uh some uh AEBL blades off to a local heat treating company, and they totally botched the entire heat treat. It was awful. Um, not only did they not come back in the right HRC, uh, but they were heavily tarnished, like they just they threw it in the in the oven without any wrapping. Uh there was no uh there's no inert gas in it or anything, so they came back like bluer than blue, and they were pretty soft too, and it was just not a pleasurable experience. And I paid for it. Um, but I'll never use them again, and that's why I stick with somebody reputable like uh Paul Boss or uh Peter's heat treat or whatever. Uh so you know, just think about it. Like there's always a trade-off in knife making. If you have um one or two uh specific types of patterns or a few that you can batch up and send to a heat treating company and everything's pretty regular, uh, then I would go that route. Um, if you're doing pocket knives and slip joints and things that you want to be spontaneous about, um, you know, you have to think about all of those uh elements that go into heat treating stuff and whether it's worth the um the spontaneity uh component of it or whether you just you know plan plan ahead, wait a few weeks, you know, your patient, and you get things back uh from heat treat appropriately. So that's kind of the idea. I mean, I don't I don't know that there's really anything else to say about it, but it it you know, whether you're gonna go through the investment of you know multiple thousand dollars in a in a kiln and uh a tester and all the other equipment and and store all those things and run the electricity for them, or you're going to choose somebody that you can pay a few dollars a blade and get everything batched up where it's a uh you know cost effective for you and then get it back and just roll through those. Uh it's kind of up to you and what you have the ability for. Um, but at least for me initially, I started setting everything off. And I've kind of uh I will send some things off depending on whether they're comp you know more complex steels that I just don't really want to deal with. And if I do large batches, um I typically won't heat treat those at home. I'll just uh if I'm doing like 20 or 30 blade batches uh and I want to do them all at once, I'll just send them off to Paul Boss. Um, but I hope that helps. I mean, I hope it's informative. There are lots of resources out there on the best ways to heat treat things, and there's you know there's quite a few uh heat treating companies out there. Um, but if you really want to get into ovens and things, search even heat or paragon or hotshot. All three of those are very uh viable options and they come in a uh a wide array of prices, uh depending on the uh the controller types and whether you want to run argon on them or things like that.