Stainless Steel Wrunts

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

Hard to believe it's the holiday season once again. Seems like we just had Thanksgiving about five minutes ago...time is certainly flying this year.

Well, there's been lots of progress here on numerous projects. I just finished prepping out some Zirconium Mini Bermuda Triangle spinners and will be trying to get them finished for a mid December time frame. Still working on the metric 3v steel Crawdaddies and I have those halfway prepped out as well, shooting for a similar time frame finish on those.

In other project news, I have more Mini 5 flute beads coming up soon. I'll be doing a second batch of titanium ones and this time will be anodizing them. There are a few bronze ones left as well so lots of anodizing and string tying is in my future.

Right now I am trying to finish up a big batch of steel Spin Wrench tools. These look somewhat similar to the Hatchling tools I made a while back but are much larger and they are all stamped. Will have those done right after Thanksgiving I hope.

Today I have the 17-4ph Stainless Steel Wrunts done. This is an interesting material and one that I have not used before, so this is basically a small first run test batch. They are all SAE, are Wroid thickness, have a great raw bar texture finish on both sides and there are a few lefties among them...

17-4ph stainless is a highly alloyed steel and has excellent corrosion resistance properties as well as high strength. Not only that, but it is one of the few true stainless steels that is hardenable and it is also magnetic. The maximum hardness is only in the mid 40's Rockwell so it won't hold a cutting edge which is why knifemakers have traditionally ignored it. However, it is plenty hard enough for a pry tool and I was pleasantly surprised at the durability in my performance testing. It held up beautifully to everything I threw at it, including several weeks of keychain carry and heavy use before heat treat, and even an overnight salt water soak after heat treat. The worst I saw was some minor surface discoloration where I had dumped a pile of pure salt directly on top of it for 10 hours and that light tea colored surface stain came off easily using a worn out green scotchbrite scrubby. Normal high carbon knife steels would be heavily pitted after such abuse so that was quite impressive. I'll be using this material again for sure in future projects.

The 17-4ph Stainless Steel Wrunts will run $70 plus shipping and the link is below. A portion of the sale today will be going to the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts. Wishing you all the very best for the upcoming holidays!

These are sold out for today, thank you again everyone!