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I tried quenching a leaf spring in used motor oil on a dare, and the results were a total mess.
A guy at the scrap yard bet me a six-pack that quenching in old 10W-30 would give a better temper than my usual canola oil. I figured, why not, it's free. I heated a piece of spring steel to a bright orange and dunked it straight into a bucket of the stuff. It didn't just smoke, it basically caught fire for a second, and the piece came out with a weird, soft scale and a warped bend I couldn't hammer out. The lesson wasn't about the oil, but about skipping the basics. I got so caught up in the 'trick' that I forgot to normalize the steel properly first. Has anyone else had a simple step they skipped that ruined an otherwise good piece of metal?
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sarahbailey24d ago
Yeah, I read somewhere that used oil can have water in it...
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emery1914d ago
Check the oil temp before you do anything. @nguyen.tara is right about normalizing, but you need to make sure it's actually hot enough first. Water boils off around 212, so you have to get it hotter than that.
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