[TheForge] Superquench/hardening power hammer dies

[Peter Fels And Phoebe Palmer]

A guess at the answer:
Because hand held tool surfaces and cooling steel are apt to be up 
against the dies during  a few of the swats, unhardened dies will need 
to be dressed a lot more often.
In the case of the  bolt on dovetail interface....if you leave it soft, 
it will take up some of the long term distortion and save the sow block 
some wear perhaps. It is an easily replacable component compaired to the 
sow block.  Buy 2...........Pete F

PlumDon at aol.com wrote:

> 
>In a message dated 12/30/2004 5:21:24 PM Eastern Standard Time,  
>schade at acegroup.cc writes:
>
>First  thanks for all the comments.
>
>The original question was in reference to  hammer dies 
>
>
>Thanks for trying to bring this thread back to the original and more  
>blacksmithing related question. I would like to again pose the question as to  how 
>many are actually using non-heat treated dies for the hammers. If you are  
>generally using 4140, 4340, 5160, etc., and making the effort to only hit hot  
>metal, do we really need to harden and temper? 
> 
>I guess my main concern would be that you might forget and bang some cold  
>metal sometime, put in some nicks and gouges that would be passed on to your  
>work.  
> 
>Interested in some other thoughts along this line. I'm currently using a  set 
>of non-heat treated fullering dies and thinking about not heat treating the  
>new set I recently got from the Old Blue power hammer folks. 
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