I’m just an amateur guy who messed with metal on occasion
And straight up not following the logic
I know heating and quenching makes it harder, which is good for knives and such, but also makes it more brittle I guess? And likely to crack?
The descriptions on this subject are literally “over explaining the scientific molecular composition of metal” or “so anyway make hot then make un hot, dat good”
But I was trying to bend some metal today, heated it up a few times and got it near its shape, then cooled it by quenching so no one would grab it and burn their hands on it while I stepped away, came back and heated again and it just broke lol
In: Other
When talking about properties we need to be careful about phrasing (im not a native english speaker so hopefully i didnt mess up too) :). I’m not sure what you mean by stronger.
Quenching makes steel harder and brittle. Brittle is what makes something easy to break.
So in metal you have soft vs harder, or brittle vs tought.
Depending on usage of your material, you need to pick a combination of those.
Quenching will usually leave a very hard surface but it will be too brittle, so we usually heat it up again to 300-700°C to remove stress in material which builded up due to very fast cooling. This will lower hardness a little bit, but it wont be as brittle anymore.
There is a lot to it, had a whole year course on faculty on heat treatments of steel, so if you have more questions feel free to ask 🙂
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