The biggest takeaway for me is that canola is not a particularly great quenchant. I would highly recommend buying a commercial quenching oil instead. I was also a bit surprised just how sensitive the water hardening grades were to cross-section and oil. I thought at 1/8″ they would harden no problem. There was a pretty sharp transition where 1084 was a step up in hardenability from 1095/W2/26C3, and then every steel with higher hardenability than that was basically insensitive to oil choice. A few potential follow-up studies were mentioned in this article, such as processing the steels for different prior microstructures. We would expect normalized steel (pearlite) or fine carbide annealed structure to have reduced hardenability, which may be significant for forging bladesmiths. The austenitizing temperature can also affect hardenability, typically low temperatures lead to reduced hardenability. And of course we can look at other steels where we think it will be interesting.

There is much more at the link, though the video is good as well.

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