Junk Damascus

[Dan Crabtree]

What type of junk have you welded up and made a neat damascus knife? Ive done chainsaw blades, roller chains, and cable.

[Steve K]

Try stacking files, saw blades, black banding, leaf springs, grade 60 rebar.
Steve

[Alan B]

Band saw blades, ball bearings, coil spring, black banding, and pieces of an old file. I bet Steve has tried this combo also. :shock:

[JPH]

Gee I welded up all sorts of stuff from old buckets to AK-47 and M-16 barrels to pry bars to even a few revolver frames. Chains, screen, all sorts of stuff..Some worked some didn't.

JPH

[irnsrgn]

LOL, sounds like the steel industry has been keeping tabs on you JUNK Damascus fellows. Thats what they are passing off as mild steel these days from all those mini remelt plants only they don't forge weld it together, they melt it together and make structural shapes out of it.

irnsrgn

[ThomasPowers]

Maille (as in "chain mail")

One quad-state I saw a blade made by a fellow who welded up lathe swarf! (Collected it ina a large coffee can, compressed it under a large press, fluxed it and welded it, nice pattern)

Thomas

[GobblerForge]

I have only made a half dozen or so knives so my experiance is limited. On all mine I use old wrought iron for the mild portion of the damascus. On two it was old horse shoes dug from the earth. On one it was an old wrought iron rail spike dug up on a job site. The corrosion was so big it resembled a turkey drum stick. I like taking this stuff and working it back to usable metal again. There seems to be a magical feel to taking what would be garbage to anyone else and transforming by hammer and tongs into something usefull. I always felt that somewhere ther was an old smith looking down and nodding at how the old shoe lived again. For me this is half the chalenge of making the knife. Brad

[ThomasPowers]

Note: damascus (really pattern welded) doesn't need to have a "mild part", you can use two high carbon alloys. You just need to use two that will provide good contrast when etched.

Makes for much better knives otherwise the "low carbon part" will lower the total carbon content of the blade. (To get around this you either put lots more High-C stuff in the mix than low-C or make the High-C as high as possible---I save the *old*--before nicholson--- black diamond files for this as they were 1.2% C and so hold the total C up better than something like 5160 at half that carbon content.)

You can make blister steel out of wrought iron too if you want to use it and keep the C up!

Thomas

[bruce wilcock]

all the nail stubs in the shoing box tipped into a pice if light wall box section, hoof pairings and all, and it worked!!!

[Nolano]

On the topic of blister steel, cast steel came from a clock maker who was unsatisfied with the consistency and quality of the blister steel for making springs. So, he figured out how to cast them. At that point, others became curious about his better quality springs, and someone posed as a passed out drunk, and while said clockmaker assumed he was asleep, cast some springs, and thats where it leaked out.
By the way, how would you make blister steel out of wrought iron?

[ThomasPowers]

Almost all blister steel was made from wrought iron; mild steel didn't come along until the commercialization of the Bessemer process after the American Civil War.

For a period take on it "Steelmaking Before Bessemer , vI Blister Steel" goes into quite a lot of detail.

At Quad-State a couple of years ago Ric Furrer took his starter material, cut into strips and put it into a sealed Case full of case hardening material and then heated it in a gas forge to quite a high temp for several hours---blistered my piece of wrought tucking in it very nicely.

He wasn't using a case hardening powder but rater a granular material used in industry.

Thomas