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GrAviTy84 posted:note on "Damascus" steel. No one really knows how to make true Damascus steel anymore. The secret has been lost. Sorry. Most Damascus steel you see either out of Seki City or out of the European copies are just etched stainless steel. It is no doubt pretty, but know that it is not the real thing. This is coming from someone who has a Damascus clad VG-10 gyuto, so, yeah, I'm not just shittalking. This includes Shun kai knives. I don't know much about knives, but I do know a lil' bout metallurgy and this isn't really true. Yes, the exact process for creating Damascus steel has been lost, but we still know roughly how it was done. Thing is, there's no point in replicating those techniques any more because frankly our source steel is no longer a heap of crap. See, back in the olden days before things like mass spectrometry and atomic theory, smiths used whatever chunks of iron ore they could get their hands on. Natural ore though is highly variable in the impurities it contains though, and if you just take the raw steel from it and beat it out into a length, the quality of the metal will vary wildy (by modern standards) along the length. Result is that there are weak points, which are Bad News. Smiths compensated for this by folding the metal. You'd take a chunk of steel and beat it out into a bar, then gather several of these bars together and beat the whole group flat. Then you'd fold the resulting amalgamation onto itself, and beat it flat again. By doing this many times you distribute any impurities throughout the steel, so you end up with lump of metal that is of the same quality throughout. This is called pattern welding (or laminating depending on exactly what you're doing), which the Damascus process is a type of (and produced particularly good contrasts in the layers). If you then abrade away the surface of the lump, you reveal the layers that were created by the folding, and that gives you all the pretty lines. If you're interested in aesthetics, you can use techniques like acid etching to pick out these layers. With modern steel though, there's no real point in this folding process unless you want show off. The stuff that comes out of an industrial foundry is unbelievably homogeneous already, and a blade that's just stamped out of a sheet of it and ground down will be just as good as one made out of hundred-folded steel. Won't be as pretty though  NB: This is also why people who obsess over katanas and all that crap are idiots. Japanese swordmaking took so long because it required many more folds than their European equivalents, and they needed many more folds because their source iron was poo poo.
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Jul 11, 2013 02:15
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 13:17 |
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