Tentacled Dagger

Some knives you design, and other knives design themselves.  This one definitely designed itself.

It's the blade I made in J Arthur Loose's Viking Dagger class which I've posted before.  I wanted to have some continuity between the handle and the blade, and I got the idea of continuing the lines from the blade core into the handle, from there the lines took off on their own and became a mass of tentacles.  From that point on I was pretty much just along for the ride.

The wood in the handle is cherry and the fittings are brass.  The blade is 9' and overall it's 14" long.  It needs a sheath, but I have to take a break - the sheath it told me to make is pretty complicated  :-\

Making Damascus Steel

A few people have asked me how the Damascus steel blade I posted was made, so I thought I'd give a quick illustrated explanation (since pictures are so much better than words). So first let me start with a disambiguation of the term "Damascus steel".  This phrase is used for two very different things.

Medieval Damascus steel was a particular type of steel that western Europe associated with Damascus, Syria, because a lot of it passed into Europe from that city.  It was really good steel for the time and had this awesome watery pattern on the blade that was a result of the chemistry of the steel and the forging process.

Modern Damascus steel, which is what I'm going to explain, has nothing to do with the medieval stuff except that they both have cool patterns in the metal.  Modern Damascus is a bit like high temperature pastry:

Take pieces of two types of high carbon steel, one of which has a significant nickel content, and one of which does not.  Stack them up in alternating layers, and fasten them together.

Here's a layer-cake of steel with no nickel (the thick pieces) and nickel-bearing steel (the thin ones).  You can see a couple weld beads on the end of the stack.  Those are just to hold them together for the first operation.  The thick steel bar coming out the top is a handle, which is about to be welded on also.

Then you heat it the pile of steel and weld it together like this:

Or you an do it with a hammer.  But using a hydraulic press makes it really easy.  It squishes it into one big block of steel with 11 layers (in this case) just that easily. 

Next you stretch the block out using a hammer.  Hopefully a powerhammer, but otherwise it's just a lot of work with a hand hammer:

Next you slit the block in the middle and fold it back on itself:

Then you weld again, as above.  Now you have 22 layers.  You just keep going - 44 layers, 88, 176, 352, etc.  352 is near the top for layer count.  You could fold one more time for 704, but the lines of the pattern will be very, very thin at this point.  I think I stopped at 176 for my knife.

Bullshit Note:  When someone says a sword was "folded a thousand times.." they are full of it.  A thousand layers, sure.  But folded a thousand times is pure crap. They'd lose so much steel to oxidation in the fire that they have to start with a block the size of a refrigerator to make a knife.

Anyways, once you get the layer count you want, you do something to the block of steel ( the billet) to make a pattern.

You could do this:

 Or this:

Or any number of things to make a pattern out of the layers.  Once you are done you hammer the steel out into bar sized for making a knife, or sword, and proceed like any other knife.

Once the blade is done you do one extra step for Damascus, you dip it in ferric chloride for a bit, which eats away at the steel that has no nickel and turns it black.  The nickel bearing steel is largely unaffected.  The result is something like this:

This pattern is a result of twisting the billet, as in the picture above.  Damascus steel is a ton of work if you don't have any power equipment, but the result is very cool.