Thread: Cable damascus?

I am curious if the bandsaw blades can be used for forging? These days, many of them are bimetal, with a soft core and case hardened only, just like cheaper files. In that case they may not be that useful.

Had a play with about 6 pieces tonight to see if they would forge but the outer ones kept cold lapping and coming unattached even with borax
also flatterened out 1 of the cables only hand hammering,
I can see some strands have cold laminated, but will see how it goes, they are cooling in vermiculite for the night to anneal them.
May need to do these at work with the 50t press in future.

from this - condemned lifting slings

to this - cut & ends welded

to this - first twist

to this & bit more heat

to this - hand hammered to about 2"x1/4" bar

to this - taken back to critical ( non magnetic) then in vermiculite to anneal overnight


A bit of gas removal happened, lucky it's not freezing here.

Originally Posted by Bruno

I am curious if the bandsaw blades can be used for forging? These days, many of them are bimetal, with a soft core and case hardened only, just like cheaper files. In that case they may not be that useful.

I would not recommend those blades for pattern welding unless you are willing to do some preliminary work in the setup. They are most likely metal cutting blades and will most likely be of a backing material (the blade) of some variety of 6150 series steel with an impulse welded tooth of M2-M42 high speed steel or the like that contains cobalt or some other metal-cutting alloy.

The 6150 is not so bad. I welded some of this material into a billet and had a very difficult time cutting the billet into usable pieces with any other normal metal cutting tool (bandsaw, abrasive disk) in the shop. I finally hot cut the stuff using the forging tools and gave the customer the pieces. It forges okay but cold cutting it is a miserable job.

The preliminary work would be to grind off the teeth. When the spark changes color from reddish to normal looking yellow-white sparks the cobalt is gone and you're left with the 6150. It will give a fairly nice contrast in the etch.

I've not run across simple case hardened metal cutting blades. Bandsaw blades that are wider than 4 inches across, designed for cutting wood are more than likely to be near 15N20 in recipe and good for PW billets.

I know it's tempting to not throw out "perfectly good looking metal." In the end it won't be worth what you paid for it.

at least it wont be worth less than I paid for it LOL
it was more for practice & playing
for the pieces I tried to weld last night I put the teeth on opposite sides for each layer
don't want to kill good steel trying to get something to work

You can hope that the nasty bits will scale away by the time you're done building up the billet. And you can erase the rest grinding to profile. It's only a few thousandths of tooth. You could be good to go by then.

The manufacturers aren't going to put more money in than required to make the saw blade into an efficient tool for what the engineers expect as it's lifetime of use (but then, you have to buy another one right?).

Make a blade and test it. If it's close to 6150, my research into blade manufacture indicated, and a little better carbon from the cable, the average carbon content should be enough for a decent to better razor blade. Patterns are subject to more variation and less predictable sometimes.

the saw blades were a fail hand forging the were laminated, when I cut the outer edges off the blades were fair easily broken apart with a few love taps from my 3lb hammer
some areas were fused but not solid
the cable seams to have faired better results so far

a rough shaping so far until my dodgy little belt grinder gave up the ghost

One thing about using 20 Mule Team Borax is to make sure it is just that Borax ONLY! They make a product called Boraxo which has laundry soap in it besides the borax & that product WILL NOT WORK!

Slawman