Spent 6 months chasing a quench oil issue that was actually my thermocouple

I kept getting soft edges on knives even though my oil was new and the temps looked right. My mentor kept saying the oil was bad, so I swapped to three different brands and still had problems. Finally broke down and checked my probe against a calibrated one, it was reading 75 degrees low the whole time. Has anyone else chased a phantom variable like this, where the obvious fix turned out to be your measurement gear instead?

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leo_jackson1522d ago

75 degrees low is a pretty big miss, not a subtle one. My own experience with a cheap k-type probe taught me to distrust anything that hasn't been checked in a year, especially if it's been knocked around. I'd say the real lesson here is less about the thermocouple itself and more about making calibration a habit before you burn cash on new oil. Grain of salt, but maybe your mentor's insistence pushed you to find the real issue, even if his guess was wrong.