Sweet Spot questions/discussion (in General)

I've spent the day trying to find SoDx sweet spots, and I've found it a little more difficult than I expected. I've at least found that [90,20](already in wiki) is a better formula, but only because it is one less ba per cycle. After that, it gets a little more complicated.

I checked each minute 89-100, and found that 90-99 all produce the same increase, and that 89 and 100 give about half of that increase. IIRC, the sweet spot is an exact number you have to get to for the largest increase. I assumed it would be the midpoint of the good range. The lowest possible range would be 89:10 - 99, and the highest possible range would be 90-99:50, leaving the range of possible midpoints at 94:05 - 94:55, so I checked 94, 94:10, 94:20, 94:30, 94:40, 94:50, and 95 and they all gave the same increase as 90-99. Similarly for tempering, I found the good range to be 20-22, giving me a midpoint range of 20:35-21:25,so I checked every number 20:30-21:30, all of which gave the same increase.

So, the sweet spot is not the midpoint of the good range, unless I made some significant mistakes(double checking would take more ba than I want to spend, and I am confident in my numbers). If instead of the midpoint it is some arbitrary value within the range, the only way to find it would be to check each value 89:10-99:50, which doesn't really seem worth it.

IIRC, pulk was the forging expert on CB1, I know he at least came up with some ratio to help finding and/or confirming sweet spots. If anyone knows any of his forge teachings, I would be very appreciative if you could share them, or if someone has some non-pulk wisdom to share, that would be just as useful.

2,1,5,2 I believe is the ratio for the sweet spot. The sweet spot is in fact a range, that lies within the overall range for the item. There is no single spot, at least not one that has been found.

sweetspot is a range, always.

and pulk's ratio was 2 : 1 : 5 : 2 which makes a total of 100%

if you miss that, you can get either 1 : 1 : 3 : 2 or just fail due to too cold or hot item.

Also realize that a bit of randomness is inherent in the forging process -- 10% variation seems to be the amount. So if one part of a cycle gives 1% typically, it may on occasion give 1.1%. This can sometimes make the sweet spot more difficult to spot.

Not really, you can clearly see the difference between 1.1 and 1.9 ;)