Frankensteel razor #1

[Cangooner]

The story of this little project has kind of been split between two threads up until now, so I figured it made sense to bring it together here.

Long story short, a question was asked a while back about whether anyone had tried melting down and re-using steel from vintage Sheffield blades. I don't have any kind of smelting experience or equipment, so that was well beyond my scope, but it got me thinking that it should be possible to forge weld together a billet made up of vintage blades. Since I had a small pile of blades that were, for a variety of reasons, beyond salvation, I decided to give it a shot.

These are the blades: there's a W&B FBU ( honed beyond recognition, poor thing ), a DD, couple Joseph Allens, a Boker, and a bunch of random others. So I strayed from the original idea in that they're not all Sheffield blades, but they are all vintage 19th/early 20th century blades. I rejected one of the blades as I didn't like the way it sparked when I was grinding it, so ended using 11 of the original 12.



I flattened the spine and tail, ground off the blades (which were essentially foil & scale at this point), and cut them off at the pin hole to avoid cold shuts.



Then stacked them, welded the billet ends, and got the forge nice and hot



They forge welded *really* nicely and so I ended up with an 11-layer billet of vintage razor steel.