Steel hardening questions

In my opinion you don't want to be ripping up a driveway, you want it packed sown and ripping will work it deep. When it rains it becomes a quagmire. What I have used is a section of chain link fence, the heavier the better and weight it down with tires, cinder blocks old steam trains or what have you. Drag that behind the tractor and it cuts and fills pretty well.
 
The practical application is hard surfacing the shanks, very common in agriculture arena as well as oil patch. If you don't weld, a local welding shop would probably do it for a reasonable fee.
 
Hardface is definitely the way to go. Besides that, hardening in used motor oil is about the worst quench medium anyone could use for an oil hardening steel, as it has lots of dilution elements in it, which gives it a quite low flash point; real quench oils have a high flash point and are light bodied for fast heat transfer; you will not get consistent results with junk oil. Commercial heat treaters only use their quench oils for relatively short periods of time due to the changing thermal conductivity over a short period of time.
 
This may be off base but I looked at purchasing a DR grader for my driveway at one time. They have a row of ripper teeth to loosen the gravel. Funny thing is they sure looked like brazed carbide lathe tools welded to a bar. Like this

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You don't mention if you have welding ability, but if you do get a packet of hard facing rods and build up the wear surfaces, you can repair them many times over this way. you can even braze carbide pieces on if the dirt you're in is really hard, but I'd try the hard facing first it really is good widely used by the earth moving and mining industries.
 
I have to agree with going to your farm store and looking at there consumables for dirt work. Bucket teeth,cutting edges ect. Find something that you can easily replace. Either bolt on or weld on. Unless your driveway is a mile long don't give edge hardness a thought. Any steel you put on it will hold up just fine.
If your going into business buy real shanks and teeth.time is money kind if a thing. If you just want to play, grab what you got. Heat it up to white hot and slosh it in ANY old oil or water. See what happens.
Have fun.

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If the steel you've got is low carbon and therefore not hardenable, you could get it to hardenable state in a couple of different ways. 1. If you have or can set up a forge using coke or even charcoal, set the part in and heat up to red heat and hold for awhile then quench in water. It will pick up carbon from the fire. repeat until required hardness.

2. Alternatively if you oxy acetylene gear set up with a carburising flame, a bit low on oxygen, heat and quench as above.

I have hardened mild steel by putting it in the firebox of enclosed wood burning heating stove leave it in the coals for a few days then take it out when red hot and quench it, will harden quite nicely.


I find a good source of cheap hardenable steel is old car/truck axles, ask your local mechanic. these can be machined, just. or annealed then machined and rehardened, to be as hard as you like, The fact that they are free makes them ideal for experimenting. I use them for making boring bars. and other stuff.
 
If I'm not misunderstanding your question, but if you're wanting to harden the face of shoes for depth control just weld some beads down the length using high hardness welding rods.
My father was the road commissioner for the township some years back and did the same thing for the Vee plow shoes for the road grader.
The gravel roads would just eat away the shoes in no time so he just ran a bunch of beads down the length using 7018 welding rod, if memory serves. Worked great.
 
WOW! Thanks for all the replies, which I'll try to reply to in mass.

I do have, and can stick weld. Sorta, the welds often look awful, but usually hold. I kinda like this option of building back the shoes once worn. Or just whack them off and weld on new. I have a fair amount of that particular stock. See how much is left after all the parts are cut. But if I could invest a little extra work now, and avoid the work later of replacing the shoes, all the better.

Using the acy/oxy torch to carburise (?) the shoe, though I'd have to break out the book on to do it, also sounds interesting.

Consumable replacements are darned expensive on my budget, so I'll have to use what I can build cheap. They also require building a shank capable of accepting them, which I don't have any junk yard material on hand to do, so more investment required.

Grading my driveway with just a blade, soon has all the larger stone working to the top, while the fines settle out. This doesn't make for a good pack. When I read about using rippers to mix the gravel up some, I thought, heck yeah, that sounds reasonable.

No, not a long driveway, nor needs graded a lot, actually mostly graded for weed control, which also requires stirring up the gravel a bit, so it might very well take forever to wear off even a soft shoe. It's just when I get into a project, I like to explore all options and possibilities of improving the final product, so long as it's on the cheap cheap.

Ovens, forges, etc., don't have, and frankly too much investment for this project. Wood stoves, don't take offense, but I wish the things were banned, I'm running 2 air purifiers in my house to keep the stench down from the neighbors smoke, allowing me to breath without a sore throat all winter. What he's "saving" on heating costs, I'm shelling out in additional health care. Somehow that doesn't seem right to me.

Just hardening the face, not the entire shoe/shank would seem to be the best. Want wear resistance, not breakage of the part. So a torch would suffice. Also, wouldn't the heat from welding on a shoe with a hardened face, diminish the hardness on it's face? I suspect that's why commercial shoes, at least for rippers, are crimped on, not welded. These aren't large items, heat would get to the hardened surface rather quickly. In my scheme, I'd heat treat after the shoe faces were welded on.

Thanks again for all the replies, it's given me plenty to think about.
 
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