Mason Protter

Yeah, I'm currently bring to decide what to add to the files. I might as well just try and combine your two suggestions and put quarters into the files, could make some cool patterns. Another thing that I really want to try and pattern weld is steel cable. I've seen some beautiful knives made from steel cable. Basically the just welded the end cable together, then left a section of unwelded cable on the end which was put through an antler handle as the tang. Beautiful knife with a really cool pattern.

Yeah, we found out much to our disappointment that heated aluminum behaves less like other hot metals and more like dirt, so it was not a very successful endeavor. The reason we tried this is that we didn't think we could get our ghetto-XXX kitchen sink forge to welding temperatures for steel, after the failure with the aluminum-copper weld (or mokume or whatever the proper term is) tried it with steel anyways and much to our surprise, we managed to weld two files together, so we're going to try and make a Damascus knife. We'll see how that turns out when we're done though

hey guys, I'm Mason, I'm new here. A friend and I are going to try some pattern welding and are planning on trying to do it with copper and aluminum because they are both pretty easy for us to get, and have low melting points. We're probably gonna try and make some rings or something, not quite sure yet. Right now the plan is to take an aluminum rod and wrap it in copper wire then heat that. Aluminum has the lower melting point of the two, so having it in the core in rod form and having the copper on the outside in wire form will help them initially melt at similar times (hopefully). does anyone have any advice? do you know if this will work or not? I haven't heard of anyone trying this, so I'm taking that as a bad sign. If you have tried this, what's the best acid to use to etch it?