I stumbled across this a few nights ago. Not sure why I clicked, but was glad I did. This guy made files by hand & hardened them in a way I had never heard of. If you've got time to spare...
That guy has some REALLY cool videos. I really like folks that get into reverse-engineering the old machines; its a lot of fun too do that stuff. I can see that I am going to spend some time watching his Antikythera Mechanism videos. Its amazing what people are building these days. And fantastic videography too. In the immortal words of John Denver, "Far out man". .
Chris/Clickspring has a website with his projects on it: http://www.clickspringprojects.com/about.html . His videos sets a new high bar for Youtube video production standards. As far as I can tell, most of the carbon packing methods for heat treatment rely on creating carbon monoxide to transfer carbon into the steel being case hardened. There's a good book on heat treatment available online: https://archive.org/details/heattreatmentofs00ober/page/n0?q=heat+treatment+of+steel . On page 213 it describes a process of gas case hardening where you flow a slow stream of carbon dioxide into a heated box packed with carbon and the steel items you want to case harden. The carbon dioxide reacts with the carbon to form carbon monoxide and this is the gas that deposits carbon into steel surface to allow it to be heat treated. It's chemically the same thing Clickspring is doing, but in a more consistent, reproducible manner without making clay envelopes for each item.
When I saw him making the carbon paste & wrapping it in clay, then into the crucible... I was like whuuuut? After the testing of the different pieces & showing the penetration into the steel, even more so. He does set the bar pretty high for Youtube video production.
I'd love to know the chemical mechanism involved with his process to get the carbon into the steel, anything that doesn't require cyanide and is relatively fast is desirable. I was watching his videos one day and saw the same places I go to for aluminium and brass bar offcuts and realized we live in the same city!.
Great video! Packing steel in a graphite bed in a steel box has been used for some time to case harden. I really like putting the work in a clay enclosure.
That whole series is amazing. Dude is some kind of a wizard. I seem to recall he even does quite a good job of sand casting something somewhere along the line. Jeff
