Rehardened My Frizzen

Thanks Wick. I will probably never quench or harden anything, but the information is interesting to me. AMD I really appreciate your sharing all of it so freely.

Artificer said:

I am certainly not any kind of expert on hardening steel, but I was taught to use a mineral oil and water mix as a "general" quenching media for small parts. The idea was there would be between 1/2 inch and an Inch of mineral oil floating on the surface of the water and that would not be as much of a shock to the metal when it passed through the oil and into the water. This was meant to keep the part from cracking instead of hitting plain water when it first entered the quenching liquid.

Oh, I also use this in a somewhat tall, clear plastic container and then use a long pair of pliers to fish the part out after the quench. That way I can use it again and again before it finally gets too cloudy to see the part in the container.
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I'm no mechanical engineer and cannot speak to any scientific reason why this works, but it always worked for me when case hardening frizzens, tumblers and sears.

Gus

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Hi Gus. I probably don't have any good reason to jump into the middle of this,But it seems like everyone's experience is different. My flintlock is a Lyman, And I do case harden the frizzens As needed from time to time. I use Kasenit , generally apply it twice and quench in water. I don't draw out the temper, they don't break and seem to be relatively hard. If they were hard steel all the way through, you would never have to re-harden them. I've always thought that they decreased their usefulness as The Flint tore away the portion that had been hardened, so I just refaced them and then case hardened them again Apply in the hardening agent twice, some, three times.
Case hardening is simply adding some form of carbon to the outside surface, and is generally done on iron rather than steel. What do you other shooters do? Do you just heat up the frozen and quench it? Or do you heated up and apply carbon to the surface? I've case hardened other metals such as key stock when I made tools out of them to remove broken pipe nipples. One time I did all the valve lifters on some XG4 engines that pumped natural gas.Has anyone on here ever had a frizzen shatter from quenching?
Thanks,
Squint

Howard Pippin said:

Case hardening is simply adding some form of carbon to the outside surface, and is generally done on iron rather than steel. What do you other shooters do? Do you just heat up the frozen and quench it? Or do you heated up and apply carbon to the surface? I've case hardened other metals such as key stock when I made tools out of them to remove broken pipe nipples. One time I did all the valve lifters on some XG4 engines that pumped natural gas.Has anyone on here ever had a frizzen shatter from quenching?
Thanks,
Squint

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Hi Squint,

Glad you joined in the discussion and you have raised some interesting questions.

Yes, if one knows what kind of steel is in the frizzen or other part, one can properly heat it to that steel's correct hardening temperature, use the proper quenching media/liquid for it and then heat it to the proper annealing temperature for that steel, so it doesn't shatter or crack in usage. The problems with this for most people are: 1. Most of us don't have a heat treating oven at home and 2. Many times you don't know or can't find out what kind of steel is in the part.

When I worked a lot of repro UnCivil War and AWI period Musket locks, I often/usually did not know what steel was in the part and I never had even a small Heat Treating Oven at the Spring and Fall Nationals of the NSSA or at the two world championships I attended as the U.S. Team Armourer. Further on some original parts, you never knew what kind of steel was in the part, if it was even made of steel and many parts were only made of Iron and case hardened.

For a few years I took a small Oxy/Acetylene Torch with me to the NSSA Nationals, but eventually found that a less expensive/easier to safely transport Oxy/Mapp Gas was all I needed. At the World Championships, we tried to rent an Oxy/Acetylene Torch, but couldn't find one for rent that wasn't a huge industrial model. So on those two trips I worked with a Propane Torch. Fortunately, you can use case hardening compound with a propane torch and you can case harden most any Iron/Steel part with Kasenit or other case hardening compounds, where you don't know if it is Iron or what kind of Steel it is. This is the reason many hobbyists case harden, because they can do it without ruining the part, even though the depth of the hardened skin is not as much as even case hardening done in heat treat ovens.

Yes, I have seen two or three frizzens that cracked or had broken off "toes" (the part of the frizzen that contacts the feather/frizzen spring) and in those cases, I wasn't sure if the problem was incorrect original heat treatment from the factory or if someone tried to incorrectly re-harden the part and made it too brittle without annealing it.

I did find that when I used Kasenit on Tumblers and Sears that I worked, to anneal them, I either used a color chart or Tempilaq 450 degree fluid as shown in the links below:

Color Chart:
http://stormthecastle.com/blacksmithing/images/color-of-steel/forging-and-tempering-colors2.jpg

Tempilaq:
https://www.brownells.com/gunsmith-...q--prod13124.aspx?avs|Manufacturer_1=TEMPILAQ

Gus

I'm sure many of you have seen this picture before but some of you probably haven't.



It shows the sparks given when various materials are ground or on our case, when they are struck by a flint.

Notice there are only a few "explosions" of the spark into bursts of many small sparks with low carbon steel and there are many, many of them with high carbon steel.
Although this photo doesn't show the sparks from alloy steels, they often are about midway between the low carbon and high carbon steel.
While this is good for our flintlocks, adding more carbon to the surface of the alloy steel will move its spark explosion producing qualities up into the "high carbon" steel range.

This can help to speed up the ignition of the priming powder in the pan.

(Although gray cast iron produces a good amount of exploding sparks, it is much too brittle to be used as a frizzen.)