Spent two full days trying to get a clean weld on a Damascus billet

I was working on a chef's knife for a custom order and my forge welds kept failing. The issue was a tiny bit of scale I missed when cleaning the steel layers before stacking them. It took me about 16 hours of grinding, re-stacking, and re-heating to finally get a solid bond. Has anyone else had a simple prep mistake cost them that much time?

3 comments

3 Comments

kim.wren3mo ago

Oh man, that hits home. Forgot to flux one section of a canister weld once and it just blew apart. Wasted a whole weekend and a bunch of powder steel before I spotted the clean patch where it never bonded.

elliotc101mo ago

Gotta disagree a little here. Flux is there for a reason, and skipping it is a choice you made, not some random accident like an oil spot. Forgetting to flux is like forgetting to put gas in the truck before a job. It's a step you have to do, not a mystery to solve later. I get it's easy to miss in the heat of the moment, but that's on you for not double checking your process. The oil spot thing though, that's just bad luck and a good lesson in cleanup.

derek9393mo ago

Feel your pain. I once spent a whole day chasing a bad weld only to find a single fingerprint oil spot. Maybe we should just glue the metal together next time.