Heat treating 4130 steel at home

Right, but that's for re-converting the martensite produced in welding. When you bend it, there is little production of martensite and it's much more evenly distributed, which is less troublesome.

4130 is an oddball in terms of heat treatment. Most 4130 tube is sold in the normalized condition; it can take quite a bit of bending, relative to its strength (and compared with a plain-carbon steel of comparable strength); and it's likely that all that would happen from bending it that much is a local increase in strength.

But I'm not going to make any recommendations because I don't know the initial condition, the application, the OP's resources for heating it, or anything else. The key things to remember about 4130 are that it's marginally air-hardening, so you can wind up hardening it when you think you're annealing it; and that overheating it can lead to cracks in the direction of the grain.

If you haven't welded it, and unless the required properties are critical and very specific, I'd leave it alone after bending.

Reply to
Ed Huntress
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ha- 25.4mm x 3mm.

The metric system makes SO much more sense.

Reply to
Cydrome Leader

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