i am considering making damascus pattern welded steel, and would appreciate any tips or advise, all is welcome.
thanks in advance

Well first of all can you forge weld? there are some good books out their Jim Hrisoulas has some great free information and his books are a good investment. http://atar.com/joomla/ Salamander armoury a good way to
start out is steel cable quick and cheep metal.

The best tip I have is to get someone who knows how to do it to work you through your first several billets. Learning it from the web or books is a whole lot slower and failure-full.

Before I welded up my first billet, a seasoned old fellow told me "if you can weld a stack of hacksaw blades together, you can do anything!"

So I dutifully worked at getting a pair of hacksaw blades forge welded together. Took me a few tries. Then I welded up another pair - fewer tries to get this right. Then I worked at welding the two pair into a stack of four.

THEN I found out I was supposed to weld a whole stack at once. So my advise is: weld a whole stack at once.

You can read all you want and watch all you want. The best thing to do is get scrap steel and keep trying until you get it. Took me several times to get it to weld but, with time I got steel to weld without using 7018 lol

Get a good book. The Complete Bladesmith has a good guide for beginning in that, and The Pattern Welded blade has an even more complete guide. Using those as a guide(And after finally rebuilding my forge) I finally successfully welded a billet this last weekend.

what did you do to rebuild your forge to make it work welding?

Almost any solid fuel forge will get to forge welding temperatures---at least for a small area. Most propane forges are not designed to get to forge welding temps and often use refractories that react to forge welding flux like cotton candy reacts to boiling water.

Now when you get a propane forge designed for forge welding those babies will weld all day and even monster billets! (Most of the pro's weld billets using propane forges)

Getting a vertical propane forge with a blower is the best investment in learning damascus. They are fairly easy and cheap to build or as low as 400 to buy. Having a forge that does not easily get to welding heat makes the whole process difficult and frustrating. I have welded damascus in my venturi forge and in coal and can say that they vertical propane blown forge so much easier and cleaner.

i am considering making damascus pattern welded steel, and would appreciate any tips or advise, all is welcome.
thanks in advance

I suggest going to one of the classes that Owen Bush teaches:
http://owenbush.co.uk/events/damascus-steel-weekend/


The short of it is..clean steel,fluxed, reducing atmosphere and wait for the flux to get active and then hit the stack like pounding a nail. Work down the billet with overlapping blows.... then repeat.

Ric

what did you do to rebuild your forge to make it work welding?

Gave it a firepot. It was flat bottomed before, it works about a hundred times better now.