Attention Glen C. and Patrick Hastings.

[Brian VanSpeybroeck]

And anyone else who is interested in pictures of the Hanwei godfred blade that Glen destroyed. We talked about it last week and then Glen sent me the blade for some pictures. I don't really have time to elaborate right now....but the pictures speak for themselves if you understand a little about heat treating. A beautiful blade seemingly ruined by bad heat treat.



Here is a picture of both halves of the sword blade that was broken. For a little more background, go back thru the posts to last weekend till you find the "Destructive Testing of Godfred Blade" thread and read up a bit if you care to. This is scary.



Looks like a heat treat nightmare to me. I have been heat treating as an amateur for about 5 or 6 years and have never been able to *get* grain this coarse. I'd like the advice of some more experts as to how and why ya'll think this might have happened.

I'll be back Sunday or maybe Saturday night to check on ya!

Pleasant dreams, Bwaahahahahahah!!!!

Brian

[Joseph Renner]

Thats horrifyingly large grain. This is probably due to a combination of bad forging and welding, and bad heat treat.

[Patrick Hastings]

Brian is that martensitic? If so can you give an approximate RC value. what are these blades supposed to be made from? Is this the powdered Swedish steel?

Grain structure like that is weak and IMO a bad flaw. This should be brought to the dealers and manufacturers attention. Hopefully it will get back to quality control and some changes will be made. Either that or at least an investigation to find out if its fluke or if all the Godfred Models are suffering from some sort of bad processing.

[Eric Litton]

Remember that for damascus it seems to be one of the cheapest swords around. I wonder if they could do better heat treat without raising the price.

[Tom Bixenmann]

Oh my. For grain that coarse I doubt if this blade was heat treated. I am not a smith, but I have seen grains like this at rendevouz style events and blacksmiths working with raw iron. To me, this looks like they took some raw, or maybe cast iron, and then case hardened the effects they wanted onto the blade. in olden times, a stunt like this would set someone up for the chop. You might want to post those pics in the Bladesmith cafe and let those guys have an infarction over this.

[AnthonyWoo]

One question tortured me for a while.

Why paying big bucks for a custom smith but can have a similar piece for much less ?!

I am happy to have the answer now.

[Brian VanSpeybroeck]

...to put a file to this blade (or whats left of it) and to a blade I just got back from heat treat that I know to be around 56 Rc in hardness. The Godfred files easily and the file makes great progress and bites easily so I'm putting my W.A.G. that the hardness is 50 Rc or less. The upper blade fragment flexes readily and fairly easily when I pin it to the table and press down on it. So this blade is not really all that hard and is fairly springy cause I flexed it pretty good. I'm leary to push it too far 'cause it's not mine and I'm *ScArEd*of it snapping and cutting or splattering me with bad Karma or something.

As far as it being Swedish powdered steel I don't know but the pattern looks unnatural. I have worked on a fair amount of pattern welded steel before and this stuff just looks....well...wrong to me. Check it out, Dudes.



As well, the crack left all kinds of jagged edges and very little bending as well as other cracks when it let go....the wife says it looks like Bisquick or cheap biscuit mix. All crumbly and stuff. I'm dying to pop the end section of this in a vise and let her have the old bend test with safety glasses and a cheater bar to see if the break was a fluke or if all of the steel throughout the blade is this way. I'm bettin' the whole blade is like this.

Check this out and notice that there is no bending or repeated stress from the blade being bent like 90 degrees and then back again. It just went *Snap*....I break as quenched 5160 and it snaps off like a twig if it hasn't been tempered but the grain is like powdered suger. Not like this which is like coarse sand or a bad biscuit....crap, now I'm hungry.



If Glen is reading this I'd like permission to put the end section in a vise and bust that pup. I'm real curious and have an idea that the whole sword was *WAY* overheated and held for like 10 minutes before quench. But I'm just an amateur and I'm afraid to guess further having had death threats from the Hanwei Ninja and stuff (kidding, not really) and I have no idea of what kind of steel or alloy we are talking about here.

Stay tuned if you are interested. Oh, and sorry about the bigass pictures and all with the slow load time and stuff. I'm an artist...don't hate me 'cause my pictures are slow.



Brian

[Glen C.]

>" Oh, and sorry about the bigass pictures and all with the slow load time and stuff. I'm an artist...don't hate me 'cause my pictures are slow"

Funny about that, my webbie mail reader brought those jpegs up in about half a second(MSNTV servers can be a good thing sometimes). I shot them over to the computer and they took three minutes to download. I had to come over here to read the thread however because my webbie has a hard time opening threads with "hosted" pics.

Ah heck, Brian; just go ahead and snap it again. try to leave me about half the pointy end though. This did break on edge impact and it will be interesting to see how it does in a flex test. Maybe stick the hilted end in a vise too.

As far as the dealers and manufacturer go, It was a Tuscany purchase a couple of years ago and I have no contact info for Hanwei.

Thanks Brian, for your time and interest.

Cheers

Hotspur, multi access forumite

[Gene George]

Originally posted by Brian VanSpeybroeck
As well, the crack left all kinds of jagged edges and very little bending as well as other cracks when it let go....the wife says it looks like Bisquick or cheap biscuit mix. All crumbly and stuff. I'm dying to pop the end section of this in a vise and let her have the old bend test with safety glasses and a cheater bar to see if the break was a fluke or if all of the steel throughout the blade is this way. I'm bettin' the whole blade is like this.

Check this out and notice that there is no bending or repeated stress from the blade being bent like 90 degrees and then back again. It just went *Snap*....I break as quenched 5160 and it snaps off like a twig if it hasn't been tempered but the grain is like powdered suger. Not like this which is like coarse sand or a bad biscuit....crap, now I'm hungry.


I'm real curious and have an idea that the whole sword was *WAY* overheated and held for like 10 minutes before quench. But I'm just an amateur and I'm afraid to guess further having had death threats from the Hanwei Ninja and stuff (kidding, not really) and I have no idea of what kind of steel or alloy we are talking about here.

Brian

I propose adding a new crystalline structure into the lexicon of heat treating: Bisquiktite, to form Bisquiktite, bring the steel up to critical temperature then hold it for 15 minutes at 400 degrees on a greased baking sheet. May require a steel alloyed with buttermilk. Quench in gravy pre-heated to 170 deg. Serves 4.

Sorry, couldn't help myself.

Gene

[CE Stone]

Hanwei Swords are distributed in the US by CAS Iberia:

http://www.casiberia.com

423-332-4700

I will be very interested to hear how they respond. I believe they will be concerned.