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Posted: 1/20/2007 4:32:10 PM EDT
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I was going to post this in the thread in the GD but it looks like that thread is dying down so I decided to put it here. I wasnt able to finish because my propane tank started to freeze up and I lost pressure so I'll add more maybe tomorrow if i get a chance to finish. I'll start by saying that this is how I make damascus. I have been making knives for about one year so I still have ALOT to learn. Take what i say here for a grain of salt please. I still make lots of mistakes but i thought some people might get a kick out of seeing how I make it. The first step in making damascus is selecting steels that will contrast each other. In this case I'm using 1080 which is a plain carbon steel and band saw blades(15n20) which is basically plain carbon steel with nickle added which will give contrast to the 1080 which shows up dark.  In this picture you can see a section of bandsaw blade on the left as well as a piece of the thicker 1080. On the right you see the billet ready to be welded to a piece of rerod. This particular billet consist of 3 pieces of 1080(the 2 outside pieces and the one in the middle) and 10 pieces of 15n20(the bandsaw steel). Im treating this billet as 5 layers in the hopes that using 5 pieces of 15n2o between the 1080 will leave thicker streaks in the finished blade.  Heres the billet with a piece rerod welded onto it that i can use as a handle.  Ok so here is my hydraulic press and forges. The tall one in the middle is still under construction, the forge on the far right with the bricks all around it is the one I will be using. The press uses a 5in Cylinder and will push around 24 tons when its bottomed out at a little under 2500psi. You can see the pump, motor and reservoir underneath.  Here are the dies that will come in contact with the hot steel. The bigger die on the left I use to flatten and true up the steel and the smaller die on the right is used to draw the billet out.  Ok here we go. The forge is fired up and the billet is coming up to temperature. As it heats up I rotate the billet to try and get a nice even temperature until it gets warm enough to apply the flux.  Now the billet is hot enough to apply the flux. The flux is nothing more than 20 Mule team Borax. It acts as an acid at high heat and cleans between the layers of steel to ensure that they will properly weld together. After this the billet will go back into the forge until it comes up to welding temperature which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2100 -2200 degrees.  This is a picture of the billet when its up to temperature. There are two things that I look at when i pull the billet out of the forge that tell me the billet is ready to weld. One is that it will be throwing off sparks the other ,that you can see in this photo, is it will be fuming.  Into the press for the first weld.  Here is the billet after the first weld. I let it cool down so i can grind the weld marks off each side . Any piece of weld left in the billet could show up as spots in the final product.  The billet as it is being drawn out.  When the billet is drawn out to around 8-9in i will cut 2/3 of the way thru it and fold it back on itself. Remember at the begining I said that this billet consisted of 5 layers? Now this billet just became 10 layers. So say if i wanted the finale number of layers to be 160 then, if my math is correct, I will need to repeate this process of folding 4 more times. After i have achieved the finale number of layers I want I will then hammer it into a knife looking shape, thermocycle it a couple times(heating it up to a certain point and letting it cool off to relieve stress), and anneal it(heat it back up and let it cool very slowly to make it as soft as i can for grinding). Any way if i do it all right it will hopefully end up looking like a knife and will get spared being thrown into the woods behind my house if i mess up  Here a couple pictures of some that didnt end up in the woods. Sorry about the quality but these are the best i could get with my camera.   If you do a little searching on the web you can find some pretty amazing stuff that some of the top bladesmiths can make. Hopefully I can make it back outside tomorrow and I'll be able to show you a finished product. |
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Very nice! I used to blacksmith quite a lot. Made a few knives, a whole lot of tools, transformed scrap steel into something useful and took new steel and made it into scrap! I welded a few billets up and also welded wire rope- real easy to do. Since then, I've gotten married and bought a house. Spare time for smithing ain't available like it used to be. I've got the space to set up a shop, just need to get around to hauling all my tools and junk to here from where it's rusting away at my parents place. Where are you in MI? I belong to a blacksmith club over in Troy, OH that meets monthly and has some fantastic demonstrations at the meetings. ETA spelling |
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You wouldn't have a set of plans and a materials list for your press would you? I've got a 25lb Little Giant set up but I need a small press like your for patterning. You can see my stuff at www.adwcustomknives.com |
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From my understanding making damascus back in the day was more of a neccessaty and making damascus today is more for the art in it. Back however long ago they used to have to make their own steel. Since they didnt have any modern equiptment this was very labor intensive and they couldnt produce alot at a time. Steel is iron with carbon it it. Carbon is what enables the steel to get hard. If you take steel with 1% carbon and layer it with iron and get it hot enough the carbon will begin to migrate from the steel to the iron thus after much heating and folding you end up with a chunk of steel with around 50% carbon. There is a formula I saw somewheres that you can use so my figures arent exactly correct but thats basically what happens. Now days i can buy thousands of pounds of steel with varying carbon content so theres really no benifit to making damascus other that it is cool looking. Do a search for wootz steel and you'll find alot more info on this eta- Im in southwest michigan so it would be about a 6 hour drive for me. Do they ever have any kind of weekend events like a hammer-in? |
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