so i took advantage of the weather over the weekend and forged up this little knife, its not heat treated yet but providing that goes well i think it should turn out awesome. the core is just a piece of mower blade that i had that happened to be the right size and the outside layers are made of old barbed wire fencing that i twisted up and forge welded together. it was interesting to work the barbed wire because it started out with a decent amount of carbon but as i welded and worked the billet i could tell it was losing carbon, mainly from the way it sparked as i cleaned it up between welds with the angle grinder. the pattern is kinda hard to see in the photos but hopefully it becomes clearer after heat treat. it wasnt quite what  i was expecting the pattern to look like but still neat.

what did you etch it in? looks nice.

                                                                                             Littleblacksmith

thanks, i just used pcb circuit board etch from radio shack mixed with water, not sure off the top of my head what the ratio is.

That's looking sweeet. Interesting pattern you're getting there, you may have just come up with a new one haha

Looks like there may some cracking or delamination going on towards the tip on the right side... could spell trouble in HT.

If you've left enough material on your edge (I imagine you've left some since this is pre HT) you could push the edge over to get the center layer better aligned - I quite literally just had to do that today on some san-mai of my own 

thanks!, i did end up pushing the one side over some, i think the core is just not perfectly, i think i worked one side more than the other. most if not all of those cracks or welding flaws or whatever they were at the tip came out as well. i was honestly surprised everything welded up as good as it did since i didnt use any flux. it started out as me playing around and then after it actually stuck together i was like "o crap what should i do with this now" haha

Neat, I like it

That is a good looking blade. I am looking forward to seeing it completed. The barbed wire look great.

Alright, so i finally finished this guy up, i heat treated it in water which worked great, i ended up with a fairly good warp in the blade caused by a small weld failure. i got it straightened up and cleaned up and then decided to make a guard out of the same barbed wire i made the knife billet from. when i etched the guard i found it had a more active pattern vs the stuff i had made for the blade. im guessing its because i didnt fold the barbed wire as many times to weld up the guard. the handle is red oak finished with danish oil. 

as you can tell by my hand, it was just a tad bit sharp after hand sanding   a little honing with a 1200 grit stone and its razor sharp.

Great looking pattern, whoda thunk barbed wire could be used for pattern welding!? Awesome idea! 

I once welded up a blade using chainmail and thought I was pretty hot till I met a guy at Quad-State who had welded up a blade from lathe swarf; of course that was about 20 years ago now.

Nice to see that one finished!  That guard might make interesting tsuba material.

On 4/29/2016 at 2:40 PM, ThomasPowers said:

I met a guy at Quad-State who had welded up a blade from lathe swarf

i have actually thought about doing that but wasnt sure how to go about it. was thinking either attempting to do a canister weld with the 1084(?) powder steel ,which ive never tried before, or just twisting and welding it like i did with the barbed wire and then doing a san mai construction with a 1095 core. good welding practice either way