Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Damascus

This semester I took a patterned metals class. The first part of the semester we made mokume gane (which I keep meaning to post on) and the second half of the semester we made damascus steel. Damascus steel is a very technical, labor intensive process that yields beautiful patterned and strong steel. We started with two different types of steel, cut them into pieces, welded them in a stack of alternating layers, forged them out into a long strip, and repeated that process until we had a stack of 120+ layers. My billet ended up being 150 layers. A lot of people in the class made knifes, but I just wasn't into the whole weapon thing so I made I made a sheet to work with for jewelry purposes. Its about 10" long and 3" wide, and maybe about 16 gauge thick. I can't wait to work it into something!Photos Courtesy Tedd McDonah.

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