This is a short photo-essay on making damascus billets from sheet steel.
Sheet metal of medium to high carbon content can easily be found at scrap
yards, along side railroad tracks any many other places. Banding for RR-timbers
is usually 14ga thick 1070-1095 steel. As a hobby armourer, I always have
a lot of scrap sections of 1050-1095 steel around. These are my primary
sources.
To start, you'll need some way of cutting the strips. I use a Beverly B-1 metal
shear. Anything that will cut metal will work, though.
Once you cut them out, do your best to straighten them. Next, in the pics here
I placed them in a vise and tightened it, then tack welded them along the sides
every few inches. These billets were eventually welded in a small coal forge.
I used to have problems with the strips buckling when first placed in the fire when only wrapped with wire.
I now just tack weld on the ends, tie wire around every several inches, then weld the whole
mass onto a handle piece and use a propane forge for welding. this heats much more evenly
so it doesn't buckle them as bad. Even if it does gap before coming to temperature,
there is no "crud" in the propane forge! Here's several billets...two before welding,
one after welding and one two piece 1022/W1 composite bar.
To weld them, place them in the forge, heat to dull red, flux it, then heat to welding
temp and hammer lightly. If you hit it too heavily, you'll shear the welds as you weld them
and you'll get a poorly welded billet. Be sure the entire billet is at temperature where you're doing the weld...
You're making 10-15 welds at once! After welding a section, re-flux it just a little farther down
and repeat the welding process. When doing a stack of strips like this, I usually make two welding
passes down the entire length just to make sure I have a solid billet before manipulating the bar.
I then draw it out and cut into 3 or four sections, stack and weld them again. By starting with
10-15 layers, you can easily reach several hundred to several thousand layers in 5-7 welding/folding
cycles.
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