Hi, can anyone describe the process of making a feather pattern damascus billet?

Liamh, I assume your asking after the spacific technice for the pattern. Sorry I can't help, just not my area of study. Hopefully one of the knife guys will chime in.

rather than laying a 10 inch long bar of 300 layers as a random pattern, we restack the layers so its more like a 1 inch square bar of many thousands of layers quite a few inches tall, then using a non sharp (dull)  wedge slice through this stack, splitting the bar in half length wise from top to bottom. then forge weld it back together. The dull cutting tool stretches the layers as it splits,  rather than a clean cut.  so when rejoined they are the feathers. After we flatten the bar out with this new seam as the center of the bar we expost the stretches gettingg ourr feathers.  So a large mouth press is handly for both splitting it and getting the tall stack made in the first place.  If you are doing this by hand you got a lot of work ahead trying to forge weld a thick and narrow stack.

Kevin Casey used to have a wip on his site, but I looked today and it isn't there. Maybe you could email him. His photos helped me a lot. I found that closing up the final weld is the most difficult for me and I use both the press and power hammer, and go slowly.

John

Thanks for the kind responses!