Buffalo Power: Hold and Win

A working bench for blacksmiths, bladesmiths and knifemakers. It answers the two questions every forge job actually turns on: how much stock to start 🚀 with, and what a piece of steel will become if you cool it the way you plan 🗺️ to.

Its centre is a real continuous-cooling-transformation field. Pick a steel, set your section, and drag ✋ a cooling path down through the diagram 📊 — the slope of your finger is the quench severity. As you drag, the microstructure splits live into martensite, bainite and pearlite, the as-quenched hardness lands on the readout, and the path names its own faults at the exact point they happen: nose clipped and you have soft spots, through Ms too fast ⚡ for that thickness and you have a crack risk. Drop a quenchant on it — brine, water, fast oil, canola, hot oil, marquench salt, plates, air — and the path snaps to that quenchant's real severity for your section. Or work it backwards: draw the result you want and the bench tells you the severity you would need.

Around that sit the rest of the numbers 🔢 a real job needs. A volume-conserving stock calculator 🧮 that draws out, upsets and tapers a bar the way forging actually behaves, with per-heat scale loss, and tells you exactly how much to cut. A temper planner 🗺️ that walks a puck along the real oxide-colour rail and drops hardness down each steel's own published temper curve, with embrittlement bands marked. A taper and balance ⚖️ solver, a heat-schedule builder that validates itself as you edit it, a symptom-first troubleshooter covering sixteen real defects with the curve shape behind each one, interactive heat-colour and temper-colour scales, and a drill that trains your eye on curves, quenchants and colours. Twenty-eight steels are written out in full — plain carbon, alloy, tool, stainless and high-speed — with austenitising windows, soak times per millimetre, Ms and Mf, hardenability limits, temper tables and the mistakes each grade punishes.

Job sheets tie it together: a steel, a section, a schedule 🗓️ you tick off heat by heat, the path you drew, and what actually came out of it. You can optionally photograph your offcut rack so the stock calculator 🧮 can match a job to steel you already own — everything works with the bin empty. Nothing needs an account, nothing is uploaded, and every prediction says plainly that it is a teaching model built from published metallurgy, not a substitute for a data sheet and a hardness tester.