Thread: Damascus steel and razor care

Originally Posted by cannonfodder

...That way you avoid the inherent saw-tooth edge. That micro saw tooth edge is what makes damasks knives cut so nice but not necessary what you want in a shaving razor.

This is a myth. A honed, pattern welded, or wootz, blade will look the same at the edge as on a honed monosteel blade. All the pattern will have been abraded away leaving clean shiny polished steel. Any micro saw appearance is from too coarse a stone and the scratches left behind from that.

I don't have a camera microscope but this should be easy enough to validate for anyone who does.

Interesting. I can neither confirm or deny your claim, I am not a blacksmith but picked that tidbit up somewhere.

Pattern steel has become popular for kitchen knives the past few years but it is not Damascus. My grandfathers Genco is also marked Damascus but is really patterned steel. My pocket knife is Damascus, around 30 layers if I remember correctly, Kershaw. Cuts anything I ask it to. Livi still forges his own Damascus but uses a solid core and sandwiches the Damascus to it, which is what I have. I believe the above statement came from him, but could be mistaken. At any rate, the reason I got a Damascus razor was because I like the look of Damascus. I won’t say it shaves any better or worse than any other custom I have but it sure does stand out in the display case.

Originally Posted by cannonfodder

Interesting. I can neither confirm or deny your claim, I am not a blacksmith but picked that tidbit up somewhere.

Pattern steel has become popular for kitchen knives the past few years but it is not Damascus. My grandfathers Genco is also marked Damascus but is really patterned steel. My pocket knife is Damascus, around 30 layers if I remember correctly, Kershaw. Cuts anything I ask it to. Livi still forges his own Damascus but uses a solid core and sandwiches the Damascus to it, which is what I have. I believe the above statement came from him, but could be mistaken. At any rate, the reason I got a Damascus razor was because I like the look of Damascus. I won’t say it shaves any better or worse than any other custom I have but it sure does stand out in the display case.

It's not a problem, merely a correction . That belief was based on some "advertising" of the day about thirty years ago, justifying why people should buy pattern welded knives or steel. There used to be discussion about hard and soft layers in pattern welded materials. Present day knowledge of metallurgical behavior has dispelled that myth as well. A good deal more is known about simple steel than before.

These are only beliefs, sometimes much harder to dispense with despite evidence, but easy to play into for the marketing crowd. It's often easier to sell something for irrational reasons. The marketeers hope that people will maintain a short attention span and spend their money on something they've heard rather than studied.

I'd be happy to donate some of my own patterned material to the cause if we could convince some of the microscope owning honemeisters to provide the objective evidence. I even have some Pendray wootz in a razor to evaluate. Randy and Ron do not live that far from me. This is do-able.

There a lot of good pattern welding being done these days. The Japanese have taken pattern welding to the modern industrial workshops and produce those fine kitchen knives. They are technically pattern welded but not handmade. Even in my shop there are power tools that make the work more efficient. There are a few who are getting the wootz material back into circulation, although admittedly not exactly true and original damascus wootz because of modern materials going into the crucibles.

But good steel nonetheless and very effective as a cutting material, but really surprising that it cuts so much better in the unhardened state. In my experience of handling old wootz blades, they are more often soft pearlite than hardened. I have access to many old blades as the Oakshotte Museum is very near where I live. Most of those old blades are not hardened to where I'd take a blade.

It'd be very interesting to see a truly rigid wootz blade made for war. I suspect it would be in several pieces. A rigid sword will fracture and not withstand the rigour of combat as well as a springy blade. Indeed this is the purpose of a differentially hardened blade. Even so there are a great many different opinions in print. Caveat emptor.