Thread: Why are Damascus steel razors so expensive?

Actually how a craftsman values his work has a lot to do with the price.

In the dark ages the art of Damascus blade forging was lost to the west because no one could afford it anymore. Even Kings at the time couldn't afford one blade for themselves let alone to outfit their men. The only peoples that could still make such blades at the time were the vikings and the Japanese.

When the gun came into being armourers could make armours that could withstand rounds fired from a gun, but very few were ever made cuz even Kings from the superpowers at the time had trouble paying the bills for such armour

I feel your economic reasoning is a little to modern, more for mass produced goods that can be made by anyone anywhere. Many blade smiths spend years at the forge before they have the skill to forge weld with enough proficiency to keep from burning the metal or getting slag inclusions in the billet. And out of all of those smiths, even less will have the patients for the work. When you are dealing with a skilled craftsmen you pay what he asks for or you don't get it. If you want to only pay for half of what he is asking then that is what you will get, half of the smiths effort, or you go to wal-mart and pay even less and have it fall apart as you take it out of the box. If no one wants to pay for a smith's best work he is not going to pander to the masses and offer his best for less, he will just offer what you are willing to pay. If a smith pandered to the masses then blacksmiths and ornamental iron workers would still be main stream. the fact that they are not should tell you they are not willing to do the work for any less then what they feel their work is worth.

No, it shouldn't affect honing unless the types of metals used would affect the honing by themselves. Back to the wood example, the layered bit of wood would be just as easy to cut through with a saw as the single piece of wood, that is unless one was pine and the other oak.

There is some contestation whether a damascus blade will cut better then a none damascus and whether it will keep it's edge longer. There is something in saying that the imperfect layering in the blade will add to the microscopic serration on the blade, but then a razor sharp edge has such fine serrations on its edge that by the very nature of having a razor sharp blade would nullify any bonuses of the damascus constriction to add serrations to the blade. It, in my opinion, would benefit cutting ability on a knife or sword but probably not on a razor. Will it will hold a edge longer? Most likely not. Even if the blade absorbed more carbon allowing it to achieve a hardness beyond that of a standard blade during heat treating it would need to loose that extra hardness during the tempering process. If too much hardness is left in the blade it will chip to easily and be to fragile to use.

Originally Posted by Toplin

thanks everyone for their input. I was thinking of getting the TI damascus.

Not sure yet.

They are expensive, as I'm sure you already know, and they are a bear to hone. If you do get one unless you enjoy a challenge get it pre-honed by a pro. Read thebigspendur's review and that of another couple of guys who bought one and you''ll see their experience with honing it.

I happened to get a good deal on a used one but it wasn't shave ready and I had a job ahead of me getting it up to speed. Thanks to diamond plates, Shapton pro stones and the SRD felt in the process I enjoy shaving with it.

We were talking about this thread in chat,,,

Here was the question I asked,,,

To anyone that owns a Damascus razor, does it honestly shave 2-20 times better than your other razors...(based on costs)

What I was asking was, based purely on the shave quality alone, are they worth the money??????
Not anything else but where the steel meets the face.... Now be honest

Originally Posted by gssixgun

We were talking about this thread in chat,,,

Here was the question I asked,,,

To anyone that owns a Damascus razor, does it honestly shave 2-20 times better than your other razors...(based on costs)

What I was asking was, based purely on the shave quality alone, are they worth the money??????
Not anything else but where the steel meets the face.... Now be honest

If you are looking at your face and the razor in the mirror while shaving I would say unequivocally yes ! If not well.... I dunno ... have to think about that.

Originally Posted by LeeringCorpse

The purpose of folding metal is to help impart carbon into the metal. Carbon will migrate from coal or charcoal into the metal. But also the simple act of folding it will make it stronger.

this really doesn't make much sense in the current context. yes the two steels generally have slightly different carbon content and it gets evened out as far as i have read, but that's the most expensive and inexact way to control carbon content.

Originally Posted by LeeringCorpse

Even a forge weld isn't a perfect joining of metal. A hammer that has been forge welded after many years of hard use will start to come apart at the welds. It is this flaw that makes a Damascus blade more durable then a standard blade.

i don't understand this at all, isn't it the exact same process? how is welded blade more durable than a cast one?

Originally Posted by LeeringCorpse

Take for example a 1 inch thick strip of wood and another piece of wood the same dimensions, but made up of several strips of wood rather then just one. The piece composed of many pieced will be able to bend farther then the other piece of wood before breaking or taking a permanent bend.

are they glued together in some way? because if they are i don't see where the difference would come from, if they aren't well then the lack of bonding accounts for the difference, but at the same time makes the analogy with welded steel completely wrong.

please do explain better if you can, because none of this makes much sense to me.

btw, if you're thinking about work hardening that's a very different thing. and you can hammer without folding with much better result.

Damascus technique got it's rise from poor quality of steels back in the old days. Even smelting wrought iron through charcoal could not impart enough carbon into the metal to give what we would consider a high carbon steel today. The smiths only way to get a steel that was usable for blades was fold the metal. You are right though, steels are now manufactured with enough carbon in them so folding to achieve more carbon is not necessary. And most blade smiths now use propane or gas forges and gas will not migrate carbon into the blade.

In a liquid form two different metals will become one, but in a forge weld they stay two pieces. Think of forge welding as though it is Velcro, two pieces that stick together but are separate in the end, each piece keeping the properties it had before they were joined.

Sorry for my inability to type what I am thinking. Yes, I did mean the wood to be glued together. The glue being softer then the wood will allow the different pieces to move more freely then if they were one solid piece of wood. Some bowyers will use wood glued to their wood bows as a backing. The glue binding the two woods together, but allowing them to move more freely. The same in essence for a forge weld.


As for the durability, that depends on the type of durability one is talking about. If you want a durable hammer you want to forge one from a single piece of metal. But a blade is entirely different. A blade needs to bend, flex and absorb shocks when it has little mass to absorb shocks. As far as razors go it is pretty much a moot point, a razor will never be up the the rigorous uses that a knife or sword would. But a damascus sword will be more durable then a standard bladed sword. Why? because of those layers. By forge welding you are creating a structure within the blade itself making it stronger in a way. Take concrete, it is very fragile, but add a structure of metal to it and it can bend and absorb shocks in ways it could never have before.

No, I was not thinking about work hardening. After you make a blade you heat treat it by quenching in in oil, water or a brine. This will make that steel hard and brittle and in some cases it can make to steel so brittle that dropping it could break the knife or sword blade. So then you need to temper that hardness out of the metal so it can be usable, but of course you don't want to take so much hardness out that the blade is soft.

i don't think the forge welded joint has the properties of the glue you're describing. it's actually solid state diffusion, so there's no media with different elastic properties to enhance shock absorption.
but yeah i believe the consensus is that in the antiquity the process was to control carbon content, since the technology was really rudimentary.

anyways, as far as i understand it these days pattern weldging is for purely aesthetic purposes (i know companies like shun claim functional advantages, but these can be achieved much cheaper).

I wonder: how many of the layers in a damascus razor can be found at the edge, within the bevel area? Does it work like that? It just would seem to increase the change of forming artifacts between the different folds to the consistency of the edge.

And wouldn't a more tensile edge roll easier? Seeing the paper thin edges we need on a razor, wouldn't damascus be a bad option?

I like the looks of them and can see paying for the aesthetics, but I would like to know that it is a purely aesthetic characteristic that I'm paying for. I would rather spend the cash on a plain non-folded razor that is easier to hone than a fancy looking one that that I dread having to work back into shape.

I dunno. I think I'm starting to understand less about damascus than when I start reading this thread...

After reading the comment about carbon steel at the end of [1] I think I'll stay with it. Metal with a pattern (however it has been archived) can look really nice but I'm afraid there's more an aesthetic than a shaving value. In spite of that it would be nice to try one but not with that price.

[1] playground.sun.com/~vasya/Bulat-Achim-Stainless.html