Martin, Thanks for the suggestion. I may try that.
Buoymaker, That's an interesting idea. I may actually have some flat spring stock laying around (did I mention that I'm a packrat too? - from a long line of packrats
) that I could try forming. As I recall, there's enough stock (an old vacuum cleaner cord retract device) that I could probably try 100 times. It would probably take that many tries to get the rehardening correct on something that thin. That assumes it needs to be annealed before being bent to shape. You'd probably have to have it red hot withing an inch of the quench surface so it didn't air cool too soon.
