Thread: TI Damascus Steel

Anyone ever shaved with a TI Damascus model?
http://www.classicshaving.com/catalo...551/977914.htm

They sure look pretty, but for 900 dollars, they need more than looks.

What are the benefits of these over sheffield steel?
From the background of the steel it seems like these would be the holy grail of straight razors? Maybe more of a collectors item?

I know....I was wondering about that myself.....that kind of money is definately more than I can justify spending the coming oh.........50 years or so....

Do a search in the forums for Damascus. This has been discussed before to a great length... In basic, damascus steel was developed to combine two diferent characteristics of diferent steels in one sword/knife. That's elasticity and strenght. So, the layers with these properties alternate in Damascus steel to create one strong AND elastic blade (with beautiful pattern). In modern Damascus steels there is no need for these properties, since they are not used for combat, so the pattern is achieved with acid etching of two diferent steel types. The softer one gives faster. What Damascus steel does to a razor edge is still discutable (maybe brings more carbon=sharpness between the layers?), but it looks COOL...

Nenad

They are very pretty. Here is an example of a Maestro Damascus with a customized elongated monkey tail. Lynn

These razors are really nice but definetly out of my price range.

I have one and I have very mixed feelings about them. I don't know about the maestro's but I have a 5/8s TI.

The shave actually feels very different though its hollow grind, to me it feels more like a wedge, very comfortable. You could shave the same area of your face 100 times and get no irritation.

On the negative side they are a bear to hone. When I got mine I was still in the beginning to learn point in honing and the razor out of the box was probably the worst razor I've ever had it actually wouldn't shave at all and I spent hours with the Norton trying to get the thing shave ready I actually polished off the pattern from the edges of the razor it was honed so much.

Maybe I got a really bad one I don't know. At this point it shaves very well but I have other razors that shave better to tell you the truth. It seems every time I spend another 10 minutes on the coticule it gets a little better. At this rate probably in another few years it will be a surperb shaver. So do I think its worth the money? For the average guy out there the answer is a big no. But if you can afford it and are someone who has to have the best then probably the answer is yes.

They're pretty to look at. Metallurgically, I can't see any benefit to Damascus in an object so single-use as a razor, though. As far as "having the best", what does that mean? If you mean the best in appearance, you're absolutely right. If you mean best in performance, that's debatable. Still, wish I could afford one; I'd have one, too.

I have a 5/8 TI Damascus honed by Lynn and bought used through a group member here. I love it. The shave does feel different and the razor actually has a very delicate, lightweight feel.

Tony

True Damascus would be wonderful in a razor, but nobody makes real damascus steel. The stuff we have is a pattern-welded steel of alternating layers of high and low carbon steels, this has been considered "Damascus" steel in the western world for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, it imitates the cosmetics of damascus steel without the metallurgical qualities of the real stuff.

Scientific American had an article back in '85 by a couple of MIT metallurgists who had been studying the original damascus swords. What they found is that the way the steel had been made resulted in an alignment of the iron and carbon atoms that allowed nearly double the carbon content before getting brittle -- most "high carbon" steels get to 0.5% or 0.6% before they become very brittle, but the damascus steels frequently tested at about 1% carbon. The article has pictures of the carbon-iron matrices of western steel and damascus steel, and they are very different.

The trick was that the entire process from iron through forging had to be done at very low temperatures, below the point where it started glowing. Eastern steelsmiths stumbled into this by accident because they didn't use bellows and therefore couldn't achieve high temperatures, while western steelsmiths couldn't duplicate this because they used bellows enthusiastically because it made the steel easy to work.

The hard and soft layers came because the iron wootz chunks had more carbon in the outside than the inside (the iron was converted to steel by cooking it in a charcoal pile for a couple of weeks). The wootz chunks were pounded and folded to even out the steel quality, and the etching came about because the swords were washed in vinegar after the quenching phase (they were quenched by thrusting them into the stomach of a slave).

One of the things these MIT scientists discovered is that the best historical damascus swords had very little damascus patterning, only the very faintest of lines. Their testing revealed that these swords consisted of only the high-carbon steel with very little of the low-carbon steel at all. Legend had it that the wootz for these swords was cooked for months in the charcoal piles.
But the characteristics of the unique damascus steel meant that the "soft" steel merely weakened the sword, the high-carbon portion wasn't brittle at all and didn't need any more "resiliency". The beautiful damascus pattern was actually a characteristic of the lower-quality swords used by the "sword fodder", and became famous primarily because that's where most of the war trophies came from (and their beauty, of course).

Unfortunately, western steel production still isn't set up for this kind of production process, and since really good real damascus doesn't look like damascus at all, we're unlikely to ever see real damascus ever used for knives or razors, though I understand that it gets used in some specialized applications.

Very informative post, mparker...

Nenad