Vacuum heat treatment of special steel for hand made knives

Tesárková Klára - Bodycote HT s.r.o. (Czech Republic)

The production of knives has its roots deep in the history of mankind and even today there is great interest in handmade knives. Thanks to the development of steels and their production processes, there is a wide range of applications for stainless steel in the drawing and cutting core of steels produced by powder metallurgy. This allows knife manufacturers to achieve extraordinary mechanical, but above all visual, properties. The non-traditional combination of materials also requires the inclusion of a correctly performed heat treatment, which has a key impact on the final product in the form of mechanical properties and subsequent utility. The paper presents heat treatment in a vacuum furnace with the resulting metallography and points out the differences in cases where the heat treatment is not conducted in an optimal way.

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