I decided to do a san mai exercise in order to practice my welding and to learn about core distortion during extreme drawing.

I started with a piece of 1095 1/4" x 1" x 5" and two equal size pieces of A36. My goal was a 3" x 6" cleaver plus a tang.

The first thing that I learned is that drawing out that much width while gaining minimal length was not practical for me without upsetting the the length and by the time that this was apparent the blank was too thin to upset effectively. So I ended up with a 2.5" x 7" cleaver plus a tang.

During all of the drawing I got no indication that there was any problem with the weld, but when I started grinding I uncovered welding flaws that were now ~ four times their original size. One of them near the heel was deep enough that I decided to cut it out resulting in a 2.5" x 5" cleaver.