I appreciate the postive comments and feedback.
My heat treatment recipe for 440c stainless steel comes from the Admiral Steel website:
http://www.admiralsteel.com/reference/sstltech.html
It calls for HT of 440c as follows:
Initial Quench Temperature - 1850°F-1950°F max
Hold for 30-45 minutes
Quench in warm oil or air cool
Do not overheat (too much time or too high temperature)
Hardening & Tempering Information
300°F - 1 hour - R/C 60
500°F - 1 hour - R/C 57
800°F - 1 hour - R/C 56
I've found similar information on other websites.
I'm making kitchen knives which are thin to begin with, and I've ground two of my blades pretty thin with higher grits, so I've decided to go with 1850 degrees for 25 minutes as my hardening time and temp. I placed the blades and the three coupons, wraped in tool wrap, inside the room temperature oven and set the oven to ramp up to 1850 as fast as it can and hold it for 25 minutes. It took the oven about 35 minutes to go from 73 degrees to 1850.
One thing I haven't done yet with HT is preheat the blades at a lower temp and hold for a while prior to ramping them up to the max. temp. I'll try that in the future to see what happens as I've read that several HT specialists do it that way.
I currently do not have aluminum plates for quenching, so I air quench in front of a fan. (pics below).
Tracy Mickley's video is very informative on the steps for heat treating stainless steel.
http://knifedogs.com/showthread.php...less-tool-wrap-plate-quench-cryo-video-54mins