A little late on here, but I'm sure having the solid steel san-mai type core may have been good! I'd love to see a re-attempt of this, definitely has potential.
Videos like this are great...they don't work out all the time, but as someone whose only metal working background was a machine shop, it's really interesting to watch, and better even for learning. I don't really have space to do this kind of thing, so watching you, and others practice their craft is enjoyable.
As much as I enjoy the complete projects, I also really love coming along for the ride with your mini-projects. I find it very inspirational in my jewelry making. Thank you and keep them coming.
Just came across your channel last night and subscribed. I enjoy how you take us along for your trial and error as well as how you aren't afraid to show errors and failures. It's all part of the process. And you show it.
I think if you went 2 short/shallow cuts then a longer cut in the steel then flip the middle piece you would get a rather interesting pattern. You could also try doing four pieces with the cuts and a solid middle for a five-layer billet. These are just some other ideas to try.
I do like the concept of what you were trying to do. I'm not a metalsmith, but as someone with artistic skills, I think forge welding two types of steel first and then cutting in shallow lines on either face down to where the metals meet and then pressing the billet to stretch out the material, allowing both metals to be present on either side of your blank... like a raindrop pattern with lines instead of dots. and presumably less layers, though you could fold several times before cutting in your lines, which would give us the alternating dark and light steel layers exposed in the areas where material was removed and moved.
It’s great watching how you experiment. That will be a great pattern if you find a way to keep it together with those thin cuts. I’m not sure that wider cuts would achieve the Tiger stripe effect I think that you’re looking for.
Love the creative thinking! Just thinking out loud with a suggestion…maybe cleaning and welding the bars before cutting the tiger would have made it work better? It’s awesome that you allow “failure” of process to be part of the process. You do good work bro
Nice experiment. I have seen both Steve Schwarzer and Jay Nielson say that canister needs to be forged at near welding temps, at least initially. Unfortunately 52100 red shorts so those high temps are tricky.
Thanks for sharing your experiment. It's always useful for me to see something tried that I haven't fussed with, especially when the result is less than hoped for.
As my father told me "You learn by doing and making mistakes". I love that you were willing to experiment and find out what works and what doesn't work. Your attempt at this found flaws in the process and now you can continue to try to find a method that gives you the results you want. Even if you discover the process cannot be successfully done that way, you learned from the experience. That's what real innovation is and I love to see it in action.
I am glad to see you doing ambitious canister experiments. To many smithtubers doing the same stuff. For this one i would say go bigger, thicker steel, wider curf, but also start with a thicker billet to have you more room to compress the material on all sides. The solid center design sounds cool but you would have to make the frame, add powder, weld on 1 face, flip the canister, add power and weld on the other face. Or not have your center stock be the same size as your tiger scales to allow the powdered steel to work through.
Love the concept of the pattern! Couldn't the same pattern be achieved by normal stacking and grinding down (same pattern as the cuts) to the next layer and then drawing out into a bar?
What if you cut diagonals in each plate, and then alternate the directions in your stack so that they criss cross. Or randomized, so cut each plate randomly and stack multiple randomly. Keep trying, this would be a great design.
this is not unlike my comment on your "let's try drilling holes and filling with powder to make a pattern" video from a week or so back. I even used the phrase "tiger stripes." if this is just a coincidence, cool, if not, awesome! I haven't had the chance to learn bladesmithing yet and I am glad to see some of my harebrained ideas attempted 😁
Nice concept, kind of like a simplistic version of ladder pattern. But maybe keep the can on until the shape is more formalized and keep working it at forge welding temps.
Great to see you try new patterns. Still would like to see the cheeta forge weld. (Medium darkness etching blank, drilled small holes (5-10mm) in it the diameter of some pipes (~1mm wall with bright etching meterial) and into the pipes some rods with dark etch. Then forgeweld them together and stretch it out a bit. Schould lead to the round geometry get a bit more natural looking.
Dang it! That would have been really cool! Try again. If don't mind I might try it and see what happens too. More cool videos please! Keep up the good work.
Honestly, I have heard that alot of people have trouble forge welding anything to 52100. 52100 is my absolute favorite steel to work with, but, I have no experience forge welding with it. I think it has something to do with the chromium content being high.
This is just my observation. This is by no means critique. But I think cutting each piece individually would have worked better. Also a mounted portaband so it works like a table saw. Then one piece of cut metal and powder then the next piece turned 180° to keep the lines from being on top of each other then more powder and so on. The paint was a beautiful idea and I expect more of it in the future.
just an idea for you. what if you used a canister and do what you tried in this video, but use 15n20 for the base and filling the cutouts with 1095 powder?
I have some old digger bucket edge from a bucket I had to replace the edge on Is this suitable to forge a knife from? If so is there a way to work out what the composition of the steel is ?? Love your work 👍
There’s a lot of empty space (i.e. air) in a powder. Maybe try using strips inlayed into the cuts? That means you’ll need straight and uniform cuts. Do you have a mill?
When doing cuts like ya were in the beginning you gotta keep the bottom snug in a clamp all the way across, then you can cut down with pressure and the entire base takes that pressure.
Well, since that billet is a fail, why not stack it, forge weld it and see what you can create out of that? It may not be the pattern you are looking for, but who knows? when you quenched in water and broke it, I immediately thought of tamahagane.
Okay here's what I would have done. I would have used an angle grinder with a cutoff wheel to get some v gouges about 90% of the way through the steel. I would have done 1084 to fill. I would have not used primer as it off gases and can get into the gaps in powdered Steel and cause bad welds. I would have simply encapsulated in very thin sheet metal. As you forge the sheet metal should deteriorate through scaling. Using the V gouges I would have a differential in thickness to each line. That could give you a tiger stripe pattern. Furthermore on initial heat I would have got it much hotter. Look like you are around a 2200 to 2300 hundred degree range. I would have liked to see that up towards 2500
Maybe, after cutting, you could swap the middle one around (back to front), but this will mean putting the powder in on both sides, which could be a problem. Maybe you could leave the sides off and put the powder in from both sides, tacking the one closed after the powder has bee inserted. As they say, it is better to make mistakes and stay humble, than to have (constant) success and become arrogant. The important thing is to learn out of your mistakes! When I saw the small photo of your video, I thought they were nails (one up one down) fitted inside a cage with powder filling in the spaces.
hmm there is potential there, perhaps building up a cube billet from your starting point then cutting it down and lengthening it out would give enough depth of steel to fully combine everything in a way that won't split.
I'm a bit confused and maybe it's because I as a viewer don't see everything. But in my experience almost any high carbon steel water quenched will break apart super easily when hit with a hammer. Even W1 & 2 which claim to be water quench steels. Just seeing that your welds held together through a water quench made me think you must have had pretty good forge welds, even if the grain structure was bad. But as far as I know you didn't do your normal normalizing cycles or temper it down after the quench and that's what's confusing. I didn't really see the steel itself fail. Maybe you did temper it down and it still broke in that case it really did fail. Anyways great video otherwise. Just curious about all that.
Next time, try just cutting lines from the center to the edge only about 50% of the width. It looks like it didn't weld good so, you may need to heat soak longer and do more welding passes.
Next time, clamp the porta-band saw and use it like a stand up band saw. As for the cracking, curious if you flipped the middle layer, so the saw cuts don't all line up would make it stronger like plywood 🤔❓
rapid cooling in water also makes it brittle, especially if the water is too cold compared to the metal. Decarbonization and delamination of a blade both will kill a project in its tracks.
What if you tried a ladder pattern cut, but just stopped short and alternated your cuts, that would look like the tiger stripe pattern but you should keep your integrity?
I did a similar thing but used a 1/2” thick leaf spring I cut it about 1.25” wide then cut slots with thin grinder wheel 1/3 through like ladder pattern and filled with 4800 2% powder , then rolled it out with homemade mill rollers to about 1/8 thick and made an ornamental tanto it looked good but I don’t know how it would go as a real working knife
really cool, once i build my own press i want to try weird experiments, could you try auger bits/ old hand drill wood bits? i think the spiral would make a cool clock look, each tile would be at a different angle. and if you used really small ball bearings they could be in between the spirals.
You are using 2 drastically different steels, a simple 10 series carbon steel and a very finicky high tech bearing steel. Maybe if you used something more similar but that would still contrast the powdered steel it might have worked better. Also the 52100 was being worked colder than 1700 degrees which is likely the biggest problem leading to the failures
@Fire Creek Forge I didn’t say it wasn’t possible I said you were using a very finicky steel and the temp range is like 2000 degrees and don’t forge at all below 1700. Maybe your camera played tricks with the colors but it certainly looked to get into that 1600 and even 1500 temp range a couple times once you removed it from the mild steel
I've forge welded 52100 with the 1080 powder lots of times, and was forging it near welding heat. The lack of pressure against all surfaces (difficult to do in this case) during welding was the cause I believe.
Suggestion: 4, 1/8” layers, 1070-1095 HC, randomly cut with the bandsaw. Clean up each layer and weld the cuts with a hard, high nickel bead, mill flat, repeat 4 times. Stack and edge spot weld the 4 layers, rip it down the middle, stack both halves onto a solid core of thin leaf spring and draw that out. 🤷🏼♂️
Glad I’m not the only guy that turns quality steel into garbage. I seem to have real gift for it 😋 Of course I’m just trying basic Damascus not fancy out of the box stuff like this. Hopefully you try again because that could turn out pretty cool looking.
@Mangroveoftoes I agree. Through the restacking and reforging(under the proper heat), this billet could be reused to make useable blade steel. Though the original pattern would most certainly be lost.
@Liquid Midnight07 Take it from another knife maker grain structure has to do with the heat treatment not the cold shuts in the steel so Cutting it up and re-welding in forging it back out would’ve been good.
Restect the pieces that you broke off, keep folding the steel, you can still get the pattern, do a semi with a hardcore to it, you might be onto something🤔
🤔 To get a tiger stripe pattern, couldn't you make normal damascus with a bit thicker than standard layers and make a press die of sharpened (bullet shaped) pieces of round bar in a staggered arrangement to create ridges in the billet. And then you grind the ridges in the billet down to get a tiger stripe pattern.?.
Hmm I'm late to this...but....wire edm might be just what your looking for...if I had the cash and a shop id splurge for a wire edm to try stuff like this...I have seen some very interesting cut outs with it...dolphin and fish hook canister damascus might be possible with a wire edm cutting out the dolphins...
I made this comment on another of your projects, and thought I was posting it here. Oops. But the comment I wanted to post here was just something I was wondering as I watched. Combine rasp bars already have raised ridges for threshing grain, and the steel (no idea of what it is), sure is long lasting. Most any ag dealer might have a pile of used rasp bars around, and it might be a good source of unique material for your projects. Just an old farmer letting his mind ramble. I sure enjoy your site.
A simple, light, and small vibration tool can be made with a simple battery powered motor out of a toy, added weight on one side of the shaft, in a hand held shell would work great for setting the steel dust.🤔. Or even a small speaker hooked up playing low frequency 🤔🤔🤔
Ever thought about maki'n the cuts when the Steel is on temperature? ;) Do you got a cutting device for your press, or for the Hardy hole of your Anvil? If you know Niels Provos, watch his Video about " How the Snake is comming into the Sword?". ;)
Very interesting. I would try it with the pattern being a polar opposite of the one it was placed to. If the first is cut 🔺🔻🔺, the second is cut🔻🔺🔻, then the third is again cut 🔺🔻🔺 and so on. the pattern wouldn't really change and the holes in one piece, would be supported by the adjacent piece.
Wouldn't it have been much easier and better to use a cutoff wheel? Seems like you're not exactly giving a tiger stripe just a very very thin line of 1084
A little late on here, but I'm sure having the solid steel san-mai type core may have been good! I'd love to see a re-attempt of this, definitely has potential.
Videos like this are great...they don't work out all the time, but as someone whose only metal working background was a machine shop, it's really interesting to watch, and better even for learning. I don't really have space to do this kind of thing, so watching you, and others practice their craft is enjoyable.
I appreciate you watching!
As much as I enjoy the complete projects, I also really love coming along for the ride with your mini-projects. I find it very inspirational in my jewelry making. Thank you and keep them coming.
great to hear, thanks for watching!
Just came across your channel last night and subscribed. I enjoy how you take us along for your trial and error as well as how you aren't afraid to show errors and failures. It's all part of the process. And you show it.
Welding the cuts seems like the best way to do this. Takes a lot more time to clean up but you remove a bunch of those cut stresses
that spray paint trick to keep the outer layer from welding was worth the price of admission! thanks for that awesome tip!
I think if you went 2 short/shallow cuts then a longer cut in the steel then flip the middle piece you would get a rather interesting pattern. You could also try doing four pieces with the cuts and a solid middle for a five-layer billet. These are just some other ideas to try.
I do like the concept of what you were trying to do. I'm not a metalsmith, but as someone with artistic skills, I think forge welding two types of steel first and then cutting in shallow lines on either face down to where the metals meet and then pressing the billet to stretch out the material, allowing both metals to be present on either side of your blank... like a raindrop pattern with lines instead of dots. and presumably less layers, though you could fold several times before cutting in your lines, which would give us the alternating dark and light steel layers exposed in the areas where material was removed and moved.
It’s great watching how you experiment. That will be a great pattern if you find a way to keep it together with those thin cuts. I’m not sure that wider cuts would achieve the Tiger stripe effect I think that you’re looking for.
I actually thought you used the axe heads to make a Damascus pattern, it would have been interesting, 15n20 in-between and powder steel to fill gaps
Love the creative thinking!
Just thinking out loud with a suggestion…maybe cleaning and welding the bars before cutting the tiger would have made it work better?
It’s awesome that you allow “failure” of process to be part of the process.
You do good work bro
Nice experiment. I have seen both Steve Schwarzer and Jay Nielson say that canister needs to be forged at near welding temps, at least initially. Unfortunately 52100 red shorts so those high temps are tricky.
Can't hit a homerun every time you step up to the plate. Love your work
Thanks for sharing your experiment. It's always useful for me to see something tried that I haven't fussed with, especially when the result is less than hoped for.
You bet, thanks for watching!
As my father told me "You learn by doing and making mistakes". I love that you were willing to experiment and find out what works and what doesn't work. Your attempt at this found flaws in the process and now you can continue to try to find a method that gives you the results you want. Even if you discover the process cannot be successfully done that way, you learned from the experience. That's what real innovation is and I love to see it in action.
For sure, thanks for watching!
I am glad to see you doing ambitious canister experiments. To many smithtubers doing the same stuff. For this one i would say go bigger, thicker steel, wider curf, but also start with a thicker billet to have you more room to compress the material on all sides. The solid center design sounds cool but you would have to make the frame, add powder, weld on 1 face, flip the canister, add power and weld on the other face. Or not have your center stock be the same size as your tiger scales to allow the powdered steel to work through.
Love the creativity and effort! Keep at it, that's how breakthroughs are made 👍
Always enjoy your ideas regardless if they always work. Never stop imagining things!
Love the concept of the pattern!
Couldn't the same pattern be achieved by normal stacking and grinding down (same pattern as the cuts) to the next layer and then drawing out into a bar?
What if you cut diagonals in each plate, and then alternate the directions in your stack so that they criss cross. Or randomized, so cut each plate randomly and stack multiple randomly. Keep trying, this would be a great design.
Really enjoy failed projects. Because even when they fail, you always learn something. :)
this is not unlike my comment on your "let's try drilling holes and filling with powder to make a pattern" video from a week or so back. I even used the phrase "tiger stripes." if this is just a coincidence, cool, if not, awesome! I haven't had the chance to learn bladesmithing yet and I am glad to see some of my harebrained ideas attempted 😁
Nice concept, kind of like a simplistic version of ladder pattern. But maybe keep the can on until the shape is more formalized and keep working it at forge welding temps.
Great to see you try new patterns.
Still would like to see the cheeta forge weld. (Medium darkness etching blank, drilled small holes (5-10mm) in it the diameter of some pipes (~1mm wall with bright etching meterial) and into the pipes some rods with dark etch. Then forgeweld them together and stretch it out a bit. Schould lead to the round geometry get a bit more natural looking.
I love when you go all mad scientist. Growing the craft!
Thanks for always trying something new. Education for all of us and keep up the good work!
Cool concept!! What about leaving the middle piece whole, leaving some structural integrity, and the pattern just wouldn't go all the way to the edge?
Dang it! That would have been really cool! Try again. If don't mind I might try it and see what happens too. More cool videos please! Keep up the good work.
Honestly, I have heard that alot of people have trouble forge welding anything to 52100. 52100 is my absolute favorite steel to work with, but, I have no experience forge welding with it. I think it has something to do with the chromium content being high.
I would have like to see the finished pattern of the blade, good try. As you were saying the education continues!!
This is just my observation. This is by no means critique. But I think cutting each piece individually would have worked better. Also a mounted portaband so it works like a table saw. Then one piece of cut metal and powder then the next piece turned 180° to keep the lines from being on top of each other then more powder and so on. The paint was a beautiful idea and I expect more of it in the future.
just an idea for you. what if you used a canister and do what you tried in this video, but use 15n20 for the base and filling the cutouts with 1095 powder?
I have some old digger bucket edge from a bucket I had to replace the edge on
Is this suitable to forge a knife from? If so is there a way to work out what the composition of the steel is ?? Love your work 👍
This pattern could work as outer (decorative) layers for a san mai blade
Just needs to be thin enough
Maybe forging 4 pieces together to start with your desired solid billet?
I respect the imagination, and I always post my failures as well as my successes Great Job !!
There’s a lot of empty space (i.e. air) in a powder. Maybe try using strips inlayed into the cuts? That means you’ll need straight and uniform cuts. Do you have a mill?
When doing cuts like ya were in the beginning you gotta keep the bottom snug in a clamp all the way across, then you can cut down with pressure and the entire base takes that pressure.
Do the cuts like you did and put it on a canister with powdered steel. It will give the pattern you were after without the cracks happening
Yeah could’ve seen that coming from a mile away. :)
Solid layers between the pattern could’ve saved you. Or rotate the middle layer.
@Fire Creek Forge True, and that is commendable. :)
Don't really know until you try..!
Compress it like an accordion first when you set the welds not just on the sides. It will work.
Another way the accordian cut could have been done is using strips, and staggering welds along the layers and opposite on the other side.
knowing what *NOT* to do is as good as knowing what *TO* do, in the end. No big loss... you learned something.
Bummer. That pattern was looking promising. Great trial-and-error. Now we know and knowing is half the battle.💪
Glad you show experiments that don’t turn out how you planned.
Maybe you could try getting inside the cuts with a little file, and then just giving it a little bit of vertical pressure when you weld
Well, since that billet is a fail, why not stack it, forge weld it and see what you can create out of that? It may not be the pattern you are looking for, but who knows? when you quenched in water and broke it, I immediately thought of tamahagane.
Okay here's what I would have done. I would have used an angle grinder with a cutoff wheel to get some v gouges about 90% of the way through the steel. I would have done 1084 to fill. I would have not used primer as it off gases and can get into the gaps in powdered Steel and cause bad welds. I would have simply encapsulated in very thin sheet metal. As you forge the sheet metal should deteriorate through scaling. Using the V gouges I would have a differential in thickness to each line. That could give you a tiger stripe pattern. Furthermore on initial heat I would have got it much hotter. Look like you are around a 2200 to 2300 hundred degree range. I would have liked to see that up towards 2500
That would probably work
Maybe, after cutting, you could swap the middle one around (back to front), but this will mean putting the powder in on both sides, which could be a problem. Maybe you could leave the sides off and put the powder in from both sides, tacking the one closed after the powder has bee inserted. As they say, it is better to make mistakes and stay humble, than to have (constant) success and become arrogant. The important thing is to learn out of your mistakes! When I saw the small photo of your video, I thought they were nails (one up one down) fitted inside a cage with powder filling in the spaces.
hmm there is potential there, perhaps building up a cube billet from your starting point then cutting it down and lengthening it out would give enough depth of steel to fully combine everything in a way that won't split.
I like that you show some of your experiments. Thank you
I'm a bit confused and maybe it's because I as a viewer don't see everything. But in my experience almost any high carbon steel water quenched will break apart super easily when hit with a hammer. Even W1 & 2 which claim to be water quench steels. Just seeing that your welds held together through a water quench made me think you must have had pretty good forge welds, even if the grain structure was bad. But as far as I know you didn't do your normal normalizing cycles or temper it down after the quench and that's what's confusing. I didn't really see the steel itself fail. Maybe you did temper it down and it still broke in that case it really did fail. Anyways great video otherwise. Just curious about all that.
I had cracks continually showing up as I forged, the same place the weak spots were on the quenched steel...
Live and learn.
Can't wait to see you try again.
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for watching!
Definitely should add a solid piece for the core and make a San mai with your pattern on the outside
Next time, try just cutting lines from the center to the edge only about 50% of the width. It looks like it didn't weld good so, you may need to heat soak longer and do more welding passes.
Next time, clamp the porta-band saw and use it like a stand up band saw. As for the cracking, curious if you flipped the middle layer, so the saw cuts don't all line up would make it stronger like plywood 🤔❓
Weld on the two sides and grind those down then forge weld and do your thing. Great idea keep going.
rapid cooling in water also makes it brittle, especially if the water is too cold compared to the metal. Decarbonization and delamination of a blade both will kill a project in its tracks.
What if you tried a ladder pattern cut, but just stopped short and alternated your cuts, that would look like the tiger stripe pattern but you should keep your integrity?
I did a similar thing but used a 1/2” thick leaf spring I cut it about 1.25” wide then cut slots with thin grinder wheel 1/3 through like ladder pattern and filled with 4800 2% powder , then rolled it out with homemade mill rollers to about 1/8 thick and made an ornamental tanto it looked good but I don’t know how it would go as a real working knife
I feel like perhaps forge welding it lengthwise would prevent some of the cracking.
I appreciate your willingness to experiment and find "what if?".
I like where you’re going with this 👍 52100 is my nemesis…
really cool, once i build my own press i want to try weird experiments, could you try auger bits/ old hand drill wood bits? i think the spiral would make a cool clock look, each tile would be at a different angle. and if you used really small ball bearings they could be in between the spirals.
just one question, why don't you use borax/flux to maybe weld the material better? But I like the idea of creating a new kind of damascus.
You are using 2 drastically different steels, a simple 10 series carbon steel and a very finicky high tech bearing steel. Maybe if you used something more similar but that would still contrast the powdered steel it might have worked better. Also the 52100 was being worked colder than 1700 degrees which is likely the biggest problem leading to the failures
@Fire Creek Forge I didn’t say it wasn’t possible I said you were using a very finicky steel and the temp range is like 2000 degrees and don’t forge at all below 1700. Maybe your camera played tricks with the colors but it certainly looked to get into that 1600 and even 1500 temp range a couple times once you removed it from the mild steel
I've forge welded 52100 with the 1080 powder lots of times, and was forging it near welding heat. The lack of pressure against all surfaces (difficult to do in this case) during welding was the cause I believe.
Would doing the stripes like they do a ladder pattern work to make a tiger stripe?
Suggestion: 4, 1/8” layers, 1070-1095 HC, randomly cut with the bandsaw. Clean up each layer and weld the cuts with a hard, high nickel bead, mill flat, repeat 4 times. Stack and edge spot weld the 4 layers, rip it down the middle, stack both halves onto a solid core of thin leaf spring and draw that out. 🤷🏼♂️
I think a san mai with a piece of solid steel for the edge & spine would work
Glad I’m not the only guy that turns quality steel into garbage. I seem to have real gift for it 😋
Of course I’m just trying basic Damascus not fancy out of the box stuff like this. Hopefully you try again because that could turn out pretty cool looking.
Congrats!...you invented a new way to make chips!....sweet experiment, to bad it didnt work out the way you imagined!....keep it up!
Did you quench in water? Doesn’t that induce further stress in steel?
Break it and stack the pieces and forge weld those, still might be good pattern. God bless sir
Actually that would be a good idea. Japanese sword makers do just that. Look at what they end with.
Probably not enough material left to build a new blade in that manner.
@Mangroveoftoes I agree. Through the restacking and reforging(under the proper heat), this billet could be reused to make useable blade steel. Though the original pattern would most certainly be lost.
@Liquid Midnight07 Take it from another knife maker grain structure has to do with the heat treatment not the cold shuts in the steel so Cutting it up and re-welding in forging it back out would’ve been good.
The grain structure was terrible and became really brittle. No possible way to stack it and reweld it.
Restect the pieces that you broke off, keep folding the steel, you can still get the pattern, do a semi with a hardcore to it, you might be onto something🤔
Make a crucible steel billet out of the scraps and do a wootz knife!
How did you clean the inside of the cuts?
Maybe solid core and then two saw cut plates with alternating cuts?
Yeah I didn't think you got the can hot enough in the beginning at all
Nice experiment - had an interesting beginning.
If you don't try how do you know ? Keep on experimenting 👏
🤔 To get a tiger stripe pattern, couldn't you make normal damascus with a bit thicker than standard layers and make a press die of sharpened (bullet shaped) pieces of round bar in a staggered arrangement to create ridges in the billet. And then you grind the ridges in the billet down to get a tiger stripe pattern.?.
Wonder if you could make a Damascus billet out of a slinky or 2 with some powered steel???
Maybe!
Made me shout 'No!!!' when it came apart. Really love the concept though
cut three pieces again, but cut the pattern only in two and put it on the sides of the solid one, like a san mai
Hmm I'm late to this...but....wire edm might be just what your looking for...if I had the cash and a shop id splurge for a wire edm to try stuff like this...I have seen some very interesting cut outs with it...dolphin and fish hook canister damascus might be possible with a wire edm cutting out the dolphins...
I made this comment on another of your projects, and thought I was posting it here. Oops. But the comment I wanted to post here was just something I was wondering as I watched. Combine rasp bars already have raised ridges for threshing grain, and the steel (no idea of what it is), sure is long lasting. Most any ag dealer might have a pile of used rasp bars around, and it might be a good source of unique material for your projects. Just an old farmer letting his mind ramble. I sure enjoy your site.
Neat idea, thanks for the comment!!
I don't know a lot about forging, but, I wonder, maybe try solid steel instead of powder with the thicker stock....just a thought....
That’s a good try! Hope you get it next time
A simple, light, and small vibration tool can be made with a simple battery powered motor out of a toy, added weight on one side of the shaft, in a hand held shell would work great for setting the steel dust.🤔. Or even a small speaker hooked up playing low frequency 🤔🤔🤔
Do the same thing but drill different size holes...polka dot damascus.
Ever thought about maki'n the cuts when the Steel is on temperature? ;) Do you got a cutting device for your press, or for the Hardy hole of your Anvil? If you know Niels Provos, watch his Video about " How the Snake is comming into the Sword?". ;)
Very interesting. I would try it with the pattern being a polar opposite of the one it was placed to. If the first is cut 🔺🔻🔺, the second is cut🔻🔺🔻, then the third is again cut 🔺🔻🔺 and so on. the pattern wouldn't really change and the holes in one piece, would be supported by the adjacent piece.
just an ideea : why not use a welding rod cu actually weld the cuts then proceed with the forging.
Where do you get your Metal from?
Try the same operations except instead of the saw cuts drill a series of holes in the stack, fill with powder, etc. Polka dot damascus?
Wouldn't it have been much easier and better to use a cutoff wheel? Seems like you're not exactly giving a tiger stripe just a very very thin line of 1084
It gets much wider when forged out
When you weld it in canister just try to weld it little bit more with borax.
Oh well. Still worth the try. Lesson learned. On to the next one.
thanks for posting this. Most would not just deleted it. Good job.
mgs
The experiments are great, the planning and preparation need a bit more work