Hard-facing ice picks

Hey,

I have been playing with the idea of hard-facing a set of picks for my Black Diamond Cobras.

I know there are some technically inclined people on this website and thought I would poll thoughts in this endeavor.

The process we have come up with is to grind down the existing material to make room for the hard-facing material to be added. Then the picks will be preheated before applying the weld to keep the picks from cracking. They will have to be allowed to cool back to the preheated temperature before making another pass.

We will be using a high impact resistant hard facing rod. The results I am aiming for are increased impact resistance for the point and some residual wear resistance. Only the tips of the picks will be treated.

Thoughts?

Brilliant dougie2008

Git er dun

Not a metallurgical expert by any means, but by treating the tips only (implicitly, the removal of original pick material) I would think that you'll be significantly weakening the pick itself and making it more likely to snap.

Pick fatigue and failure can generally be attributed to the pick removal process, e.g. the side-to-side torquing necessary to remove a deeply driven pick from fat ice. I can foresee the removal of pick material will create a "stress riser" (is this the right term?) at the spot where you begin to narrow the pick.

Black Diamond picks are notorious for breaking, although I've heard anecdotally that the issue has been rectified in the more recent batches.

Thanks to Eric Dumerac @ GravSports for the image.

I can't help but wonder if your hard facing process will increase the likelihood of broken picks. Ar you really having such an issue with rapidly dulling picks? Or is this just an exercise to try something cool and see what happens?

No matter what you do, I most certainly would NOT lead or solo with any modified picks. If you're a smart man, you'll save them for running infinite laps on top rope.

I am mostly doing it because I can and sharpening the picks is a bit of PITA. I currently do not lead ice and I completely agree with you about not leading on modified picks at least before some significant strength testing.

The idea is not to make millions because the hard-facing processes if it works would make the picks much more expensive.

As for the removing the material this would be to allow for the same pick profile. Hard-facing is a welding processes that will add material to the surface.

The Heat Effected Zone of the weld is one of my concerns as is the union of the base material to the new material. I am hoping to keep the added material to a minimum only adding to high impact areas.

I'm not a materiels engineer (though I have taken 2 courses), I am not a metallurgist, and I haven't done stress analysis since college.

I'm with Jon H. I doubt this will work and is probably going to weaken your pick. Unless you have a good setup where you can control hardening due to atmospheric absorption (I forget what this is called) and you have researched the metals well, their bonding properties, and potential galvanic interaction you are unlikely to succeed even if the idea is feasible.

Also, with hardness you often sacrifice strength (not always a rule of thumb). So if you are doing any kind of dry tooling or mixed climbing that might be a bad idea. Finally, while you may have to sharpen less often (assuming the brittleness doesn't cause the top to break off more often) the time it takes to sharpen will obviously increase. I'm not sure you gain anything here.

Jon, removal of material can sometimes remove a stress riser so it's not an automatic. However, the way I understand it is he intends to replace that materiel with a harder materiel.

That said, go for it safely. Wear eye protection and a top-rope. If this is fun to you, no reason not to try.

I can't speak to ice climbing - only ever done it with a guide at a man made crag for top roping.

I have had many pieces of equipment hard faced and selecting the right material for our use was always fun.

I would have to agree with everyone above, though, that removing material and replacing with hard facing would not be a great idea. Not to say it wouldn't be worth doing to test a few times to see, but from my research the harder the material, the more brittle - in other words you could make picks out of tungsten carbide, but they would be so brittle that you couldn't apply any torque or they would snap immediately.

With a steel core, they might work for a while, but how could we tell when they are ready to fail due to fatigue?

This sounds interesting and fun, though, so give it a go and report back. Many different ways to skin this cat.

Even change the whole design/shape of the pick so that the core could allow the pick to endure more cyclic loading?

Give it a try. I have made other mods to my BD laser pick and they work great. The mods I made was thinning the picks from 3mm to 2.8mm and changing the height from 11mm to 9.5mm. I just got some brand new picks and they measure 3.3mm now.

One of the reasons I modded the picks was, a partner of mine had the Cassin All Mountain tools with the ice pick on. They were significantly less tall. So I file mine down to the dimensions of his picks and they worked great. Stuck hard ice like a dream. Didn't break even when I hit rock and even tried a few torques.

I think it's 4130 alloy @ 45HRC. I tested the hardness but can't analyze the alloy but I'd be surprised if it was something else.

I found an article stating the BD picks are made from 4340 Chromoly steel. We have not decided what type of hardfacing rod will be used.

Temperature control is one of the biggest factors that will affect the outcome according to the research I have been doing.

Or you could save the money you're about to waste and just buy Petzl tools and picks...

George Barnes wrote:Or you could save the money you're about to waste and just buy Petzl tools and picks...

Actually the more I think about this, the more it doesn't make much sense. If you lay down a hard coating it will be gone once you do your first sharpening. Unless you replace the entire first tooth.

I agree that they do ding up fast. A better option might be to harden the tip a little more and see how high you can get before they start to become unreliable.

People keep bringing up the same old pics of snapped off BD picks. I've been swinging the new Cobras since they came out. I've never broken a pick including the laser pick which I use almost exclusively. I'm not delicate with the tool at all and have hit a lot of rock.

I have even made a smaller cross section laser pic and it stands up well too.

Like Mike I'm also a metallurgist (who mostly does casting, not this). If you do manage to perfectly add the hard facing material without porousity or voids, you are going to have to completely re-heat treat the picks. To get 45Rc on 4340, they probably do a quench to nearly all martensite which is really hard and really brittle (63Rc) and then temper that to the toughness they need. You'll need to re-do all that because if you don't there will be a heat affected zone just behind the tips that will be much softer and possibly embrittled in some way. BTW re-heat treating also tends to embrittle steel, so careful there as well. 4340 is the alloy that BD uses in there pitons as well, so they are probably just going with the devil they know and it works so why change. That being said, you could probably find a better alloy out there, but for strength + toughness + cost + availablity, 4340 is pretty damn good.

I think you'll find that sharpening picks is not even close to a PITA by comparison. That being said if you want to, go for it, lot of good ideas start with some one saying it won't work. Message me if you want to as well, I am curious how it goes.

you would need to heat the entire pick and the braze a harder metal on as planned. this would allow the pick to cool and temper more evenly.

are you an expert SMAW weldor, or a farm/garage 'weldor'?

To do the welding processed the picks will be preheated. Welding on 4340 without preheating it would crack and possibly break the pick.

I am not a welder by trade but two of my really close friends are professional welders. We will be using TIG to add the hardfacing material and I have just received some used picks (thank you MP members).

These picks are missing most of the first tooth so the plan with them will be to grind ~1/16 inch off the sides of the pick for ~1/4 inch from the from the tip. The tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding method will be used to rebuild the pick profile. After tedious sharpening the picks should last much longer than the standard material.

With 7 samples I plan to try different hardening and tempering processes to remove stresses and any ductility/brittleness added during the welding processes. The ideal result will be a super hard and deformation resistant layer over the standard 4340 pick (think Japanese sword hard sharp blade with a softer backing material)

Lastly will be the testing phase. Install a modified pick and hit things... safety glasses and face shield will be used per the chance to fracture the metal and send shards flying at high velocity. I will also be trying to bend the picks to see if the processes has made them to ductile. If I am lucky I may be able to get access to a rockwell hardness testing machine. I will be sure to take lots of pictures and document my findings. It is really just a big kid science project (curls up with my copy of materials science and engineering and some hot chocolate).

Thanks everyone for the comments and concerns. It is has brought some things I have not considered into the equation and I look forward to sharing my findings.

This weekend I saw that many of the professional climbers were using custom made Russian picks. Apparently surplus tank armor steel.

Has anyone here tried making their own picks from any modern super alloys? Maybe something like CPM 3V which even at 57hRc has considerably higher impact resistance than 4340 in the mid 40s. It's easy to buy small volumes of Crucible tool steels for experimentation.

Dobson wrote:This weekend I saw that many of the professional climbers were using custom made Russian picks. Apparently surplus tank armor steel.

Interesting. Do you have any more info on this? Or which climbers had the picks?

Jon H wrote: Interesting. Do you have any more info on this? Or which climbers had the picks?

I think I saw Gord McArthur with a set on his Nomics. There were also some on Force Alloy tools running around the show.

Here's the website for those picks.

Krukonogi.com

For a time BD was selling Aermet picks. These were made from the steel they use for arresting hooks on carrier aircraft. I have a few and they are just about impossible to dull or break. I would not weld or even heat up a pick for fear of brittleness. It is not fun to break a pick in the middle of a pitch.

On the bright side, at least BD picks are easy to change out without tools.