DanielC Posted September 7, 2019 Share Posted September 7, 2019 *NOTE: My memory of some things is a little foggy. This project was ongoing and posted on my IG with some details not here I imagine @caublestonecutlery This is about 30% of the steel I made this year. Some of it didnt make the cut as I was experimenting and testing different parameters of the furnace and run. Average spark of this seasons orishigane The puck that the spark belonged to Cut puck in half. Rather porous to be expected, but still very dense Polished and etched to show dendritic structure Spark test showing extremely high levels of carbon Very neat puck. This one showed a gradient of cast to steel. Break on the edge indicated cast Spark test of steel portion Another steel portion As we move into the cast region the spark starts to turn red and shorten Another very short reddish spark Cast Steel Here is a sample piece from same puck showing gradient Not really sure why i posted two of identical pic. Fuzzy pic of same piece etched Better pic of etched surface Time to cold break with 12# sledge Fractured like glass Polished and etched a sample More dendritic structure Beautiful colors One half of the first puck made into a plate, hardened and broken Beautiful break and grain Sparkin high This is half of the very colorful puck. With the higher carbon and mix of cast, wroughting was a chore but worked Very intense spark. 1.5%C+ by estimation. Probably in the 1.7-1.9 This came from a different puck, it was from an experiment with Al Hard to see, but fully dendritic Very high spark. Length of sparks shortening quite a bit Some of this went in the bar, some of the rest went into a crucible Parts of it was clearly at or above 2%C 1.8-1.9%C This truly is beautiful steel Odd how the colors remain even after forging This puck was a good study The blue, clean surface. The blue color is indicative of hearth steel It cast a beautiful spark. 1.5% range by estimation This guy was a 5# monster Very big 1.7'ish Cast Edge of cast A great shot of my fingerprint Squishing some of this into plates Showing that even at this high %, it is carefully forgeable for plates. The grain on this, which is the massive puck is so close to cast It was a feint gray in color. 1.8-1.9%C by estimation Sparks also indicates this 1.8-1.9%C Very short, not far from turning red. Another broken plate from a different puck It was an eventful day. I was sore, but very zen. Not bad. Not all of my material of course. Just a random pic of a random plate Bottom right chunk is Grade 1/b Tamahagane. The rest is mine. The big bar is 6 fold orishigane made by me. It is waiting to combine with this next bar. The small bar to the left is 12 fold bloom iron for the eventual core. I found out a Lowes 20 miles away had 3k firebrick. So I decided to make a traditional japanese side blown Needed a table made for this. You got that right. I had a little guidance by from a friend of a Japanese Swordsmith for the construction. The EPK clay I washed it down with was cured I wanted to leave as much ash as possible This i gently packed down More pure ash added Wetted and packed in further Rod for tekogane plate Even some japanese sword smiths use Borax for this step. A mix of some borax and rice straw ash, along with Japanese rice paper to wrap. It wraps well. No wonder they use this. Coated in more rice straw ash Clay slurry I created a year ago when these endeavors began Literally first forging in this new forge was this project. Feel confident. The confidence was somewhat warrented, and also not. I lost about 1.5# of material into the forge, as the rod was made of orishigane, and that was my mistake. Not shown in the pics is the creation of the rod, made of material like the rest of the sword material. So it melted. Not to panic, I had the rod from the previous half and it was made of wrought iron with a much higher melting point. At this point there was no fuss, and I wire welded it to my bar that was now 1.5# lighter. It consolidated well however. As you can see I went on to fold this bar, alternating my cut and fold width wise, and length. This is a lengthwise fold Clean bar. 5 folds (Ran out of charcoal for a 6th). I will fold this 1 more time, and then stretch and cut in half, and doing the same with the bar from last year, combine them all to fold together another 6+ times. Even after 5 folds, the carbon level is very intense. Yep That's it for now. Other projects have pulled my attention. Thanks. Its a ton of fun. A lot of work and practice has lead to this The blues were actually in my orishigane. The grade 1/b tamahagane is just meant for my own study. This is video of my work on this last year. Again, last year making the first half of this blade. Each heat is basically a fold, so yea welding heat. It may get a quick low heat at the actual folding the bar over part as it is a bear to bend and work such a high carbon steel. Once tbe temps cool down cool enough as the bar is being drawn out, it feels like a thick bar of W2 or mildly the same resistance something like crucible will give the hammer. The first half i worked last year was a tremendous amount of work. I was developing my methodology while also figuring out how to get the steel the cleanest. The first half was made from melted wrought and some had bloomery bits in it. Except after reading aristotles accounts of steel in his version of a furnace, i learned that if i took the material i melted once already and melted it again, i would have a cleaner steel that had a higher homogenity in carbon. Which it did. The only drawback was the return in steel quantity was greatly diminished. I think the first bar had probably 12 melts worth of steel in it. Which incudes the remelts of the melts. Between that bar and this bar i made a fair amount for testing and even made some for trades with other smiths. Then i took a break ajd started working on other projects. Charcoal is expensive, and i get bored of making charcoal in the retort. I revived this project after spending the day at Jesvs's old house on top of the mountain. He had a lot of spare crane cable, and implored me to use it in remelts. So this past spring i decided to do probably another 20 melts or so testing out one parameter of the furnace to another. I even ran into some problems that required me to have a neureaka moment while reading Art of the Japanese Sword. This last bar is made from remelted crane cable for the most part and my hope is that the differing feed materials may lend to a contrasting hada on the blade in the end. Ive found that the feed material isnt all that important. I still have tk send pieces for analysis, but my suspicion is that the remelt process at least strips the steel of Mn in the melt. My testing with the remelts over time have indicated this. Ive melted 1018 that had .8Mn per spec sheet, and the resulting 5 fold steel example was as shallow as you would expect from Mn devoid steels. The modern steel remelt also did not require a 2nd or 3rd remelting to achieve the cleanest steel possible either. It all folds and sticks to itself like a dream. I think you have seen a lot of this live on my IG Caleb. Have been working on the ability to push carbon into high carbon steels to make them higher carbon steels using higher carbon orishigane and carbon migration principles laid out by Verhoeven. This orishigane was pulled from the furnace and knowing how well I can make ultra high carbon steel from one end of the puck to the other, used the entire mini-bloom of orishigane. Folding was conducted using my own formulation of mud and rice straw ash. From there it was folded 9 times and laid to rest until I was ready to use it. The spark yielded a rather high carbon spark. Much higher than W2, so I set out to sanmai weld W2 with orishigane at mid to high temp welding heats with soak in hopes of pushing carbon into the W2. Then drawn out into a billet to be used as core material. From there I constructed a sanmai with this material and my usual 1018 mild jacket. This time using a lower temp forgeweld to mitigate migration into the mild. Drawn out and a gyuto was made. Hardened using japanese Ht techniques and just got done machine grinding it. On to hand sanding. Unfortunately I dont have time to make this a kasumi style kitchen knife and stone polish it like I really wanted to as this is going to Bladeshow and I dontnhave time. So sandpaper, loose abrassives and etchants it is. I started polishing it for kasumi anyway (japanese natural stone polish). Long way to go :0 Some micrographs of the core steel. The core steel is again W2 sandwiched between orishigane. A few show the clean weld of the two disimilar metals. I need to obtain a few more etchants to show grain boundaries. It's an obsession I've fine tuned for over 6 years now. I've started micrographing my steel from the raw hearth steel. My results compliment findings in historically produced steels found by archaeologists which is neat. I am currently poised to be assisting in creating a large database of structures for other researchers to use. Lately I have pushed my furnace to cross the 2% C threshold and making larger quantities of white cast to be mixed and blended into my steel. Once carbon starts to cross 2%, ledeburite starts to form and the material starts to become a ceramic. I've been talking with several archaeologists and even Skip William's (which reminds me that I need to get back in touch with him) about these structures. At any rate, I've gotten better at polishing for pics. Heres some more of steel under 2% C but right at it. Super nice stuff. This material is going into my nihonto projects and kitchen knives. What you see is saturated pearlite with grain boundary cementite. Once the steel is eutectoid, perlite can no longer store cementite. And some crazy widmenstatten structures that are probably widmenstatten ferrite, but based on my sparks on some of it, I swear its widmenstatten cementite. I've hit above 4%, lol. Some of that ledeburite pics show carbon in the 3.8-4% range. I've also managed to make some gray cast with precipitated graphite. However, it doesnt play nice so its avoided. This will make things clearer . You are welcome Jerrod. I knew I was pushing into crazy territory, but didnt fully understand cast characteristics until most recently, and what to look for in my product. As stated earlier in this or my crucible thread, I had various samples of my crucible steel and some hearth steel for a researcher to look at. On of the samples was a 4fold piece of hearth steel. He had mentioned then that I had a clean band of heavy cementite, or iron carbide in the piece. At the time it was a mystery, but now things are getting so clear. This is why I love metallurgy and steel creation. Theres so much I learn the further I go in my journey that I am able to critically inspect previous work and findings a refine my understanding. Anyway, the piece was cool and he did take a micrograph, albeit not as bright as mine are. He also used a Vickers hardness test that the microscope was outfitted with to determine between ferrite and cementite structures. Inside that dark band it was showing all of or most of the white to be cementite at the grain boundaries. It was really bizarre to see and try to decipher. Skip messaged me and said ledeburite, and my hunt for knowledge took off. I delved into my microscopy book and many items online. Found a lot of good information, and even stumbled across a bit of research that connected me with an archaeologist in Europe who happened to have already been following my work on IG, lol. He mentioned the test end was 5x5 microns with a 1g charge. The left side was a pearlite and ferrite strike with the indention being 15% larger and the centered hits are smaller, being cementite or iron carbide. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SLAG Posted September 7, 2019 Share Posted September 7, 2019 DanielC, Great site, thanks. It looks, to me, like an iron metallurgist's dream. Wonderful. SLAG. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DanielC Posted September 9, 2019 Author Share Posted September 9, 2019 Np, I am an iron smelter and iron melter Also, the thread title is wrong, this is by far not my first experience with these types of steels lol Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Latticino Posted September 9, 2019 Share Posted September 9, 2019 Wow, extremely interesting. Won't pretend to understand a fraction of what you are doing, but love the process and product. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JHCC Posted September 10, 2019 Share Posted September 10, 2019 Amazing stuff. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frosty Posted September 10, 2019 Share Posted September 10, 2019 Thank you Daniel, I have to follow along as a spectator but I'm loving the ride. I have a couple questions though I'm sure you've answered or explained at least one many times. If you have a web site or similar I can do some deeper looking and reading I'd like a link. However I'll toss them out now, you can shoo me hither if you're as tired of answering it as I can get. About the clay mix you cover the stacks of plates to weld. I'm pretty sure it's there to prevent oxygen contact, do you break it off before delivering welding blows? If not does the mix require special cleaning before further folding and welding? Frosty The Lucky. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DanielC Posted September 10, 2019 Author Share Posted September 10, 2019 I have a website, but I do not go in depth on the specifics. When I bring it out of the heat to weld, much of the clay melts as it contains a heavy amount of silica. The power hammer drives it away. If any gets trapped, which I'm sure it does, it is further driven out in the folding process. I have stored a lot of japanese forging footage and converse with a few Japanese swordsmiths (with broken japanese and translators, and vice versa as a few know broken english). They are not always forthcoming, but they are typically happy to show off steps in the process. Doing it long enough I know exactly where to look if I have a question about something, and with video footage going back decades to present day, along with their candid photos, the process is pretty well mapped out. I will say that part of the mixture sinters to the outside as opposed to melting and I do indeed scrape that off as soon as it comes out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arkie Posted September 10, 2019 Share Posted September 10, 2019 Wow! I am NOT a metallurgist, but your thread is fascinating to read. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SLAG Posted September 10, 2019 Share Posted September 10, 2019 I have found Mr. DanielC's 'other' post on,* bladesmithsforum I am very happy to have been made aware of that site, through this thread here. It appears to be a very authoritative site concerning metallurigal matters and knifemaking. (this opinion should be tempered in that I have not made many knives, and do not profess to be a cutler). I also noticed that there are a significant number of I.F.I. members there. Mr. DanielC mentions that he has had extensive correspondence with metals archaeologist(s). I have followed that subject for several decades and I'm curious to discover who(m) they are. Again thanks for the extensive post and pictures. I would be most interested in hearing more about your progress. Thanks, SLAG. * containing the same topic and pictures. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DanielC Posted September 10, 2019 Author Share Posted September 10, 2019 It is/was Don Foggs site and devoid of all the fluff found on some of the other blade forums. However, the forum format of exchanging information is quite a bit more dead than it ever has been and most of us converse through social media. I've been talking to a few archaeologists. One that studies medieval weaponry and another that studies ancient metals and their uses. Both are friends, and both have been following my work for some years now apparently. I would share their names, but I am not quite sure that is appropriate given this stage in our plans, idk. I'm poised to write an academic paper (as a non-academic) with one and create a database with the other. Not sure if divulging that information publicly would be wise. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThomasPowers Posted September 10, 2019 Share Posted September 10, 2019 Are you on the archeological Metallurgy mailing list? It's been pretty quiet the past few years too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DanielC Posted September 10, 2019 Author Share Posted September 10, 2019 19 minutes ago, ThomasPowers said: Are you on the archeological Metallurgy mailing list? I'm afraid not. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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