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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Heat cycling makes structures with different materials in them more likely to break, because those different materials expand differently. It’s like the thing is rubbing against itself constantly, twisting and stretching as it does.
As for heat treating metals, this one is fascinating. The metal forms a crystal lattice – a certain way that the atoms are organized. Now, different lattices are stable at different temperatures, and with different alloys. Having the proper carbon (and usually to a lesser extent other elements) content of steel is crucial to heat treatment.
The size and type of crystals formed in the metal has huge consequences for its behavior. Heat treatment allows these crystals to grow to the right size and type, and then be cooled (at a specific rate) to cement them into the structure you want.
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