Thread: First multi layer billet

The weather was nice and I had some time, so I decided to finally forge my first multi layer billet. I made a stack of 4" long pieces of steel, placed on top of a long bar of steel for support. The total was 3 layers of O2, and 2 layers of 15N20 iirc. Sadly I forgot to take pics.At that stage. The steel was ground clean beforehand, and when the stack was made, I tag welded it in place.

Heated a bit and fluxed with borax. Heated to red hot and fluxed again. Then heated to welding heat and gently hammered the billet to get the initial welds in place. Fluxed, reheated, and hammered some more.

After a short while, the flux stoipped getting squashed out of the billet, meaning that the billet was solid. At that point I started hammering harder. I have to say that doing this by hand is a real chore. Next time I will ask a friend to strike. When the billet was drawn out a good bit, I let it cool off slowly so that I could grind the sides to inspect the welds. All welds seem to have take hold nicely. It looks like a single solid bar of steel which is good.

Now I can draw it out further to turn it into a razor or knife. I didn't want to do that before because it would be silly to go through all that effort by hand then then discover only much later that one of the welds had failed.

It is quite a lot of work to do this by hand though. But it was fun. Now I have a central core of O2, with 2 bright layers running through the hollows of the razor or the sides of the knife. Not a good way to make Damascus though. I can't see myself drawing this out further, and then folding it and drawing it out again, half a dozen times without a striker.