hey Walter Sorel's back with more tips for the knife maker today Damascus so let me mention right off the bat that I'm going to break this up into several videos the first will focus on the basics of forge welding and building layer count then we'll talk about various pattern development strategies in the second video now if you've seen some of the crazy Damascus that people are making these days you'll probably be itching to get busy on that right out of the box but look unless you totally master the rudiments you're just kind of going to run into a lot of snags as you move forward on doing Damascus so the first is just going to be basics today how to make hot steel stick to other hot steel all right a few preliminaries before I get started first definitions the term Damascus steel today is used to describe steel which is composed of a large number of layers which affords welded together and then generally manipulate it in some way to create a pattern in the surface of the steel a better term to my mind is pattern welded steel but that's an argument for another day so let's talk about our materials the key to pattern welded steel is that steel must be composed of Steel's which will contrast with each other when polished or edged there are many ways of doing this but typically in modern Damascus blades Smith's use a high carbon steel along with some form of nickel steel because nickel resists acids it remains bright when etched but another more old-school approach is to use to steels with dramatically different carbon levels this will result in a subtler pattern than using nickel now if you're looking to make Damascus for a hunting knife or something of that nature a modern you know Western type knife I'd recommend using a high carbon steel like 1080 or 1095 along with a nickel steel called 15 and 20 you can buy both of these from places like Admiral steel and for most knife makers supply houses that said my bread and butter is japanese-style blades for Japanese blades I don't want to super in your face kind of pattern so I typically use 1050 and 1095 steels resulting in a subtler pattern but whether you go the nickel steel route or straight carbon steel the basic principles are going to be the same here I should point out that this is a project that assumes you've already made some knives and are now moving on to forging your own steel you'll need an anvil and affords capable of reaching around 24 to 2500 Fahrenheit or around 1350 Celsius the other key piece of equipment that you really can't do without is some kind of power squashing equipment back in the day a master Smith had a couple or three burly apprentices who trash away with 20-pound sledge hammers but today Smith's use power hammers or Forge presses one of the big rookie mistakes is trying to make Damascus without the right equipment look I don't want to discourage you from trying this stuff with a hand hammer but in the end if you're really serious you'll need a little more mojo than your right arm can provide some people try making Damascus with treadle hammers and screw presses but honestly these don't really have what it takes to do the job right if you're thinking about gearing up to make Damascus the forge press is the most budget-friendly way to go so let's get started making some stuff different guys use different thicknesses of stock the thinner the stock you start with the more layers you can build up in a short period of time I use one eighth by one inch stock but some people use other sizes this just happens to be my method first I'll clean off all the scale from my stock on the belt grinder when you buy steel from the mill it's covered in black iron oxide also known as magnetite or mill scale iron oxide will not weld so you have to get rid of it this is very tedious but if you don't get rid of every last bit of it you're liable to end up with poor welds and include that will spoil your steal just as a side note when I first got my belt grinder many moons ago I was a little scared of it because I was afraid of running my fingers into it now of course I've mastered the machine and I never run my fingers into it ever at all so all right once I'm cleaned it up I'll cut the stock to lengths for this project I'll be cutting them off at 7 inches you'll need to adjust the length to fit your needs and your Forge in this case I'll cut 24 pieces 12 of 1050 and 12 1095 make sure you mark them so that you know which ones are which I just run marks down the side with magic markers so that when I stack them up it will be unmistakable which one's 1050 and which one's 1095 I do nine little marks for 1095 five little marks for 1050 that's just my little thing nothing worse than getting ready to stack up your steel and then realize and you're not really sure which steel is which once they're cut and marked I'll stack them up in alternating layers then I'll clamp them together and tack weld them together with my MIG welder if you don't have a MIG welder you can wire them together with iron wire if you do that you'll need to use a thick piece of stock on the bottom say a quarter of an inch thick as a handle I'm going to weld up each corner running a bead right straight down each corner then I'll weld on a handle something to be aware of is that any weld material it gets into the billet will contaminate it leaving bright little streaks so don't overdo the welding just enough to keep the billet from busting apart as it expands during heating once I've got the billet welded up I'll crank up my Forge once the Forge gets hot put the billet in I should mention that I have a sort of jack-of-all-trades Forge that works well for forging swords but it's not that great for making Damascus if I did tons and tons of Damascus I built a vertical Forge which would be better suited for Damascus still this one gets plenty hot and still does the job so before moving on let me mention the three keys to successful Damascus first clean steel no oil no dirt no scale second plenty of flux and third high heat now we haven't mentioned flux yet so let me go into that a little bit the function of flux is to dissolve the constantly forming layer of oxide off the steel so that when you squash the billet together you get perfect steel to steel contact between clean steel I use anhydrous borax as a flux also known as forge borax or anti borax you can buy forged borax from blacksmithing supply places but 20 Mule Team borax from the grocery store will work fine too the only difference is that there's water in the grocery store borax that water turns to steam once it goes into the forge causing the borax to sort of blossom up off the steel and often it falls off or blows off so it's a little trickier to use but still grocery store borax works just fine so heat the bill it until it starts to glow a little then I'll pull it out and sprinkle it lightly with flux if you try to put the borax on before the Steel's hot it won't stick to the steel and it'll just blow off into the floor of your Forge but don't wait too long or you'll get scaled build-up that could contaminate things later as the flux melts it flows and covers the whole billet you want a nice wet layer of flux around every single inch of the billet capillary action will draw it right through the layers I usually hit it up with a couple more spoonfuls of borax as it's coming up to temp just to make sure that doesn't boil or drip off maybe it's overkill but hey I'd rather waste a little borax than end up with crappy wells now just so you know borax will absolutely eat the lining out of your Forge so just be aware that over time you'll have to realign your Forge if you do a lot of Forge welding now some guys have forges dedicated exclusively to Forge welding for precisely this reason I just line the bottom of my regular Forge with say tonight which lasts longer than kayo wool and things of that nature but do be aware that if you put something like say tonight into your Forge it's going to absorb a lot of heat and make the Forge less efficient but it saves me some effort in maintenance and I hate maintenance so what you're aiming for is basically a white heat just short of melting the steel now you can't necessarily rely on your eyes though a temperature that looks white-hot indoors looks sort of bright orange in the sunshine so what you have to do is rely on the appearance of the surface of the steel after a while you'll start to see the flux boiling on the steel at first it'll be a sort of slow sticky boil you want it to look wrap it and wet sort of like bubbles on the bottom of a boiling pan of water I also like to see an occasional steel spark flying out the front of the Forge when that happens it means you're running nice and hot UV protection for your eyes is a good idea staring at white-hot steel is really bad for the eyes you'll notice that in this video I repeatedly switch from dark safety glasses to clear depending on what I'm doing unfortunately it's basically impossible to get a really accurate video picture of the appearance of the steel when it reaches forging temperature in order to see the bubbles boiling I have to stop down my camera a little which gives the steel a much darker appearance than it does to my eye inside my shop but anyway this is the general look of the dancing bubbles you're shooting for just be aware that if you're doing this indoors it will actually appear white to your eye that's what you want is that nice white hot steel if you're outside different story more of an orange colors so once I reach welding heat I like to hold the billet up off the floor of the Forge and rotate it a little in front of the flame if you've got a vertical Forge this isn't an issue as you'll have the billet suspended off the floor anyway rotating it like this ensures even heat movement of flux into all parts of the billet and really gets it right up to maximum heat once the billets screaming hot and the borax is boiling energetically I'll pull out the billet and press it very gently and very quickly in the press making sure that every section of the billet gets enough pressure set the weld some people prefer to set the weld with their hammer rapidly tapping all the way around the billet that works fine but I don't have any problem getting good welds in the press I do recommend preheating your dies though just stick a piece of stock in the Forge get it red-hot then close up the jaws of the press and it'll absorb the heat this way you're sucking less heat out of the outer layers of the steel making it weld better no matter what though you want to set that weld super quickly while the entire billet is it welding heat the welds are still weak so if you get too aggressive you can cause them to shear first time out we're just sticking that well together not moving it once I've set the welds I immediately flux the billet and jam it back into the Forge as fast as possible now you'll see people that just blast away and start drawing out the billet immediately but I feel like giving it one more heat at welding temperature will make the welds less likely to shear and give you a better product in the end if you've done it right it'll come back to a welding heat pretty quickly now I'll gently squash it in the press again just to make sure I want to be dead sure I've set those welds all the way down the billet next I'll usually flip it 90 degrees and square up the village this is a good test if the welds haven't really set the whole thing will start to pull apart here at this point then you go cry a little and kick the dog you can try refluxing rhe welding and [ __ ] around with it if you want but I'm telling you right now I've never had a lot of success trying to fix really rotten welds if the welds don't take first time around you did something wrong regroup rethink then start over or at least be prepared to grind a lot of steel off your billet next I'll start drawing out my billet as you flatten it if there's even the slightest play in your dies it'll tend to slip sideways a little bit forming a kind of diamond cross-section before that happens you'll want to fix it just turn it 45 degrees and push the whole thing back to true once it's trued up you can get back to squaring everything so two ways of building up layer count way number one the old-school method is to use a hot cutter of some sort to cut the billet in half and then fold and reweld you can do it with a hot cutter on the press or you can use a hardy tool like this actually you don't cut the bill it all the way through instead you cut it almost in half leaving a thin web of Steel where you cut to thin it breaks in half too thick it won't fold over an eighth of an inch is about right give or take before folding you want to do everything you can to clean the interior surface that is the one that you'll be welding together so after i hot cut the billet i'll cover it with flux and stick it back in the forge well before it hits welding heat I'll pull it out and use a wire brush to clean as much scale off as I can I don't have footage of that but it's very simple to do depending on how big Duff it looks I may lay it face down on the anvil and Hammer it a little to get it as flat as possible if I don't like the look of the thing I may even reflux it Andry brush it one more time or I may even hit the grinder a little all depends on how it looks then I'll sprinkle yet another layer of flux on the interior surface and fold it quickly over then hammer it lightly shut I'm not trying to weld it here just trying to get the surfaces to mate as cleanly as possible one thing to note if you're using a nickel alloy nickel oxides are very hard to get rid of and borax flux won't necessarily do the trick you may need to pull the billet out and hit the face of the billet with the grinder some people like doing it with an angle grinder that's a good method to alright so once I've folded it I flux the whole thing put it back in and bring it up the welding heat again depending on how many layers I want I repeat this until I hit my target simple math starting at 24 fold doubles it gets you 48 doubled it again 96 a third fold you get 192 and so on okay so that's the old-school approach now what I'm going to show you next is the approach that I generally use from me this approach even though it's a little bit more of a pain it takes more time it takes more effort but weld after weld after weld it gives you better results at least it gives me better results here's the alternative method instead of cutting the billet while it's still fairly thick I'll draw out the billet on my press so let's talk about drawing by drawing we just mean stretching the steel out now if you're thinking about getting into this and you don't yet have a hammer or a press one thing to know is that you'll need dyes intended for flattening and you'll need dyes intended for drawing the steel out these can be moved in and out of the face of the tool to achieve different results the flat one obviously is flat and the drawing dyes are domed if you really get into Damascus you'll get some more specialized dyes like squaring dyes but we won't need them for the project we're doing in this video you'll notice that after each passes I'm drawing it out I've flipped the blade this keeps it from bending too much due to the slight difference in the profile of the top and bottom dies then I generally go at a 45 to 60 degree angle this is more related to pattern development and not because it's the most efficient way to draw out the billet we're doing a random pattern Damascus and the more different patterns that I drive into the face of the steel the more interesting the pattern is going to be ultimately so I draw it out until it's fairly long and fairly thin if it starts curving out of whack I'll true it up a little with the hand hammer then it's back to the flattening dies flatten it square it drew it up one thing you'll note as the blade gets longer is that you can't heat the whole thing in your Forge so you have to work it in sections this will be totally dependent on the nature of your Forge depending on what you're doing you may quit after the first pass but we'll be doing what's known as random pattern Damascus which requires a fair number of layers to result in an interesting pattern so we need to build up more layers I usually go about an inch and three quarters to two inches wide and about 15 to 18 inches long that just happens to be a comfortable length for drawing out the size billets that I make nothing particularly magical about those numbers the most important point is that I want the width as even as possible so I'll measure it with these rusty old calipers the point is not that it be 1.93 seven inches wide or whatever but that it be relatively consistent width from end to end you'll see why in just a minute I'll also want it quite flat necessary I'll do a little adjustment with the hand hammer the flatter I get it now the easier things will be in the next stage sometimes you get gobs of flux on there and they can cause divots in the steel as you hammer it to the final shape so scrape off any flux that might cause you trouble a wire brush will help knock off some of the thicker scale - now let the billet cool look you can see the layering right here now I grind all the scale off I like to grind the edges a little in order to make sure that I don't have any problem well not too much I'm not trying to waste any material just want to see what I got if I see any problems I can just grind them away until I reach solid wells what I'm doing here is basically the same approach I took with the original bar stock dead clean and it's close to dead flat as you can get being not see here and make this sucker clean clean clean do whatever it takes one little bitty piece of scale left on the face there can leave a divot it will turn into a problem weld and then that will stretch out and it can be a very big long ugly inclusion that will ruin your blade if you have to grind a little extra so be it nothing sucks worse than putting 40 hours into a knife and then finding out as you do the final polish that you've got a bad weld that you can't polish out believe me I know this from hard hard experience every rookie mistake you can make hey I've done it also make sure that you grind off any residual weld material from tacking the billet together now I'll divide the billet into five pieces and cut it up with an angle grinder normally I'd use my abrasive chop saw but hey it died on me just before I shot this video that's blade smithing the more tools you get the more stuff there is to die on you notice that I leave a little extra tab on the ends of the billet now I could just cut them off see the worst parts of the weld are always at the ends of the billet whether you cut them off err though you're wise to be aware of where the ends of the original billet were and to bury those ends inside the billet both facing in the same direction that way any problem welds are least likely to show up in the final blade you can cut these tabs of crap you steel off if you want but I actually like to use them as a sacrificial piece on the end where I can attach my handle that way at the end I'll cut off a goodly chunk of the final billet eliminating problem welds and any MIG weld inclusions that might have ended up in the steel leaving all the good stuff for my blade next I'll stack up all five pieces that I've made and tack weld them together again just like I did the first ones as before I'm using the absolute minimum amount of weld material possible then fire up the gas and Forge weld the stack exactly like you did the first one just repeat that stacking and welding however many times you need to reach your desired layer count in my case I'm usually making a Japanese blade in a random pattern so I need about a thousand layers but if you're doing a more modern style most likely you'll use fewer layers than that well you might ask exactly how many layers do I need well the answer is that kind of depends the question is what kind of pattern are you attempting to develop now in part two of this video we'll talk about all kinds of fancy patterns you can develop but for this one we're just doing random pattern demascus meaning that we're not really manipulating the pattern in any particularly strong way we're just layering it up and then letting the natural pattern of the steel develop in part two of this video we'll talk about pattern development and some of the fancy stuff that you can do with it I mean there are a million tricky things you can do with Damascus but for this project we're just doing random pattern Damascus meaning we're not really manipulating the pattern at all we're just layering it up and letting any pattern in the steel develop naturally if you're doing a stock removal western knife like a bowie or something of that nature where what you're aiming for is a kind of rustic funky look you can probably do fine with somewhere between 100-200 layers something along those lines but for what I'm doing I want more like a thousand okay if you did everything right you now have turned what were once twenty-four pieces of steel into this a single piece of steel with a ton of layers so we can repeat this stacking and refolding until we get wherever we want to be once we reach that requisite layer count we Forge out the blade one more time in my case I'm going to forge it all the way out to shape so I'll Forge it into a long thin bar first preparatory to forging a sword but you don't have to do it that way if you want you can forge your billet out to fit whatever blades you might want to make then just leave it in the Forge turn off the flame and give it a rough and neat that way it's ready for stock removal here's the result of our first billet now at this point you've got a lot of options I've forged one piece that I'll be making into a sword with a thousand layers so as we've seen I've gone ahead and forged it out into a long thin piece of stock but this other piece is closer to being something I'd use for stock removal if I wanted to do that I'd flatten it out just a little more say down to about a quarter of an inch thick then grind a knife directly from that billet if I go that route I want to grind the blade flat and get rid of any residual weld material from the tack welding as well as bad welds in the handle area as I said earlier this area is basically sacrificial because the pieces around the handle continue squashing together when they're not at welding heat there will be substantial areas of bad welds in here this isn't a result of poor technique it's just a normal byproduct of this process you just have to understand those bad welds will be drawn out several inches and say you want to cut or grind them as far as you need to go to eliminate them and there we have it one billet for a sword another that we can flatten out a little more and use to make a couple of stock removal knives or I can set it aside grind it off later Riis tack reweld and turn it into a japanese-style sword take a wild fly and guess which one I'll be doing so you may wonder what the results of all this work are correctly if you're keeping it in the 100 200 layer range it's not going to be that interesting I really recommend that if you're going to be doing Western knives hunting knives bowie knives things of that nature you're going to want to go the extra step and do some further pattern development and that's what the second video is going to be all about but here are some examples what the thousand layer Damascus looks like in the form of some of my Japanese blades okay that's it for the rudiments of forge welding now truthfully you've learned most of the hard stuff in the next video pattern development the techniques will be the same but you'll add twisting grinding chopping squashing and some other things to create a bunch of complex and interesting patterns by the way if you're really into this topic check out my website Walter swirls blades comm eventually I'm going to put together a very extensive video series on all aspects of Damascus making including can steel and twists and all kinds of stuff W patterns some of which is not going to be available here on YouTube next video pattern development is going to have a lot of that information for you not sure exactly when that's going to come out but should be out pretty soon thanks for watching