HT of a Sabatier

Mr.Svinarich

Mr.Svinarich

Well-Known Member
Here is the background, I landed a bid on ebay for some annealed Sabatier blanks.​

Internet searches revel nothing more about specific steel type. I do know that it is a simple carbon steel, that's about it.
I'm guessing (more like wild speculation) that its like a 10xx steel in some form or another.
After I grind it up how should I go about heat treating?

Any recipes out there?
 
Sabatier is a manufacturer. Doing a quick web search shows that they make both carbon and stainless blades. What they use is probably proprietary information but you might look them up and drop them an email and see if they will tell you. What you have now is mystery metal and all you can do is experiment with the heat treating.

Doug
 
If memory serves me there were/are a few different lines of knives with that name?

Most likely they are a carbon steel if they are over about 50 y/o?
Do a spark test. Grind a known stainless and a known carbon like a 10xx compare the shower of sparks?

Then go from there?

Have fun!
 
good suggestion Rhino, there was a guy on another forum that HT a few. I've contacted him now.

the particular blanks ill be working with were produced by Theirs about 100 years ago. Pretty sweet stuff!

There were about 12 plus brands that used the name Sabatier to market their knives. Currently there are 2, Theirs and K- Sabatier.The oldest is Theirs closely followed by another producer in the same area of France at about the same time. This was largely due to the weak or nonexistent state of copyright laws during that time. Later the companies were required to put another word with Sabatier to distinguish between brands. Sabatier in French has come to mean "a chef knife".
 
Svin,
if they are truly that old. There is about a 99% chance they are a carbon steel.

I have heard and seen so much written about all of these old "Sabatier" blades "Some with almost magical properties?"
that have been lying around through two World Wars and many other conflicts where you think they would have been scraped for steel by both sides of the conflicts for guns, ammo and the like that i am not sure what is and isn't true anymore concerning them?

You may be able to make some good servicable knives and handles with them?

Have fun and learn all you can through the process.
 
There is no doubt they are carbon steel. I should be able to make some great knives especially the handles (my favorite part of the whole process is shaping that cruddy looking, epoxy smothered, rough handle to a smooth, luxurious second palm). Ill add some bog oak (just seems fitting) and on the bigger (10 inch) blade some redwood burl?

How would you go about HTing it?
 
If you ask Doug Lester he can give you an much better exacting heat treat process.

I do almost all Stainless and have had my shop in a retail place where open flame would set off the fire sprinkers :biggrin:

I only did a Ht on a few files and carbon steel blades when I started in 98 so I could understand what is going on. I send my Stainless blades to paul Bos by the batch for whatever RC I desire?.

I could have purchased a oven and get a dewer of liquid Nitrogen etc. But my thoughts are that they have about a million in equipment at Buck Knives Paul Bos HT and do it full time, so I may get close after a few years, but why when I spent my time designing and shaping my blades.

I will pm Doug and ask him if he can help you out?
 
I've used some of these older blades in the past and the best heat treat I found was for 1084. That's where I would start and then tweak the treatment if/as needed based on the standard tests and perhaps even a destructive test on one blade to check the grain structure....
 
Chuck speaks true about the testing. You are just about going to have to sacrifice a blade here. It would help if we knew what you had to heat treat with. Are you using a kiln or a forge to heat the blades with?

Doug
 
That does make things a little easier (there's no such thing as too much temperature control). I would start out with Chuck's feeling that the steel is something on the order of 1084. It would be hard to tell what the manganese level is in those blades so be prepared for them to be on the shallow hardening side. We also know that they're annealed so they should be soft enough for any finishing that you feel like you need to do. I'm also thinking that if they were ready to harden, temper, and mount that they're quite possibly normalized. I would heat them to 1475° in your kiln for 10 minutes then quench in warm vegetable oil. After the blade is cool enough hold comfortably I would temper in an oven at 375° for two cycles and check for hardness. If the edge chips out at this temperature, repeat the tempering cycle 25° hotter and check again. Keep increasing the temperature until you have it where you want it. Etching with ferric chloride or even white vinegar will see if it's shallow hardening enough to form an auto-hamon and thus a soft spine.

Then test the heck out of the blade. Cut up cardboard of fibrous rope to check edge holding, chop a 2X4 with it to make sure it wants hold up. Then break it to check the grain.

If the blade doesn't give the performance that you want you are just going to have to play with it.

Doug
 
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