Home Forums Gear Knives and Blades Step by step in making a damascus chef knife

Nearing welding temps. The billet turns a bright yellow and when removed from the forge it flux smokes. I have tried welding with a venture forge that does not get hot enough consistently and also with coal with mixed results. I switched to a blown air forge from Uncle Al and everything got a lot easier and faster.

After the billet is nice and yellow I still let it soak for several minutes to ensure the inside is up to temp. It is then brought to the hydraulic press and squeezed with flat dies to make the first weld.



Here is the billet after a few heats and presses. I am forging it out a bit in order to make sure the welds are good.

I am going to be making a W�s pattern with the Damascus. I have flipped it 90 degrees and am pressing on the sides of the billets. This process causes the W�s effect that you will see in an upcoming pic.

To be honest, I got a little carried away with forging it down and ended up with this long bar. This took way too long because only about 10 inches can me in the forge chamber at a time, so I spent more time heating cooled steel than necessary. There was probably an hour or so of forging between this pic and the previous pic. I did see Jason Knight cut a billet in half so that there were two shorter billets in the forge instead of one long one hanging out the side. I will do this on the next stack.

Here is the bar with the scale ground off.

Here is the bar that is cut into 7 equal sections, the eight section had a split, so I figured I would just remove it now instead of trying to reweld the split. I should have plenty of steel for this knife anyway.
[img]http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e185/pike3e/17.jpg[/img]This is two of the seven bars with a light etch to show the w�s effect. It does not look like much now but after additional stacking and drawing it will produce a more interesting pattern.
[img]http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e185/pike3e/18.jpg[/img]