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
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Think of it like clay. Instead of heat, we add water to make it soft.
Soft, wet clay is malleable. If you punch it, it bends. This is equivalent to hot steel.
If you let clay sit and dry out and you hit it, it’ll just crumple. It’s not much harder, but it’ll sort of chip and turn to dust. This is like annealed steel. Easily machinable.
Quenching is like fire hardening clay. Now if you punch it you’ll break your hand because it is way harder, but if you manage to break it, it will shatter. That’s because it’s very brittle, but very hard ceramic.
Like clay, steel can be softened and hardened, except with heat instead of water.
Also, like clay, If you let steel harden, and you repeat the cycle a lot, the expansion/contraction makes it brittle.
There is a LOT about steel that is unique to it. AFAIK you can’t just add water back to fire hardened clay, but with steel you can do the cycle many times over if you do it right.
If you temper steel, which is what you do in knife making, you’re keeping a lot of the toughness of the fire hardened clay, with some of the flexibility of the wet clay.
If you could do that with clay, it’d be like punching a clay bowl, breaking your hand, and also leaving faint dents where your knuckles hit it. It had some give to it so that it absorbed the blow enough to not shatter, but still broke your hand.
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