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I Forge Iron

Ladder Damascus Dies


Jspool

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 My old ladder dies made from pieces of 1/4” roundstock wasn’t up to snuff anymore so I decided to mill a set out.

These two sections are offset by one rib and got welded onto die plates that fit my mill.  I kick myself for not being up to snuff

on G-code and cut these manually.  Next plan is to cut some curved, angled, and S ladders.

 

D167DDF4-04BE-435E-9939-E3D675F06EE4.jpeg

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Patterning pattern welded billets has two steps: deformation and stock removal.  Turns out that it generally does not make much difference which goes first.

Doing deformation first allows you to get precise patterns that are then not hammered a lot to cause them to change. (Sometimes you may chose to not hammer at all after deformation to keep the pattern just as you made it.)  So for a tight even ladder pattern doing the deformation first will work better than grinding and then hammering it out.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I found that the problem I had with grinding grooves in the billet and hammering them out was avoiding cold shuts.  Theres not much worse than making a final grind pass on a blade just to find out you’ve exposed an inclusion.  I then used dies as Thomas  entioned with using rods.  It works well.  This machined die set is the first step toward other more elaborate ladder dies which could only be milled.

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Manfred Sachse's "Damascus Steel"  had some pretty ornate dies for imprinting patterns in pattern welded billets shown in it.  Might try to ILL it from the local public library.

The Deutsches Klingen Museum in Solingen had them on Display when I was there a couple of decades ago...

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