My suggestion for quenching fails

[prime plover]

If a quench fails, instead of the item disappearing it creates, for example: failed steel falx, and changes it's texture to look damaged and cracked. At which point you can combine it with a chisel to get some metal back. The only potential issue I see with this however is that (I could be wrong) there isn't a way to melt steel bits back into ingots yet. So if you were to use a chisel on a failed steel falx, the bits you would get from it would be useless. for now.

[coral gust]

it should be trivial to just make steel bits usable as a source of iron

[hollow willow]

Or it could be combined with stick to create failed steel tools, with lower durability and mining speed, also with chance to break instantly.

[vernal kelp]

could just have to resmith the failed tool back into a ingot and try again

that way you are trading time and tool durability to get your ingot bnack