wire rope damascus quotation

I think all carbon wire comes in grease to keep it from rusting... I have always just burned it out with a torch.... something that should be done outside and away from the shop... Another thing I just remembered is there is a product called "compact swage" wire that is a bit easier to weld.... What it is ... well its compacted wire.. When the nets got bigger on the fishing boats they needed stronger cable on the winches.. but a lot of the winches have grooved drums so if they are made for 7/8 cable, you have to use 7/8 cable.... so what they did was take 1" cable and run it through a rolling press and swaged it down to 7/8... basically taking all the extra space out... not quite as flexible but since its as strong as 1" cable.... since its a tighter wire it is a bit easier to weld.. not much but everything helps.... It helps what ever wire you use to do a "tighten up" twist at heat before trying to weld it...

I made a cable Damascus blade for the first time this weekend and I couldn"t get it to quench without taking a warp. It"s an old 1/2 inch steel cable, I believe 7 large strands. I forged it down into a flat and then folded it and welded it back together to start with a thicker billet. When I forge welded the cable I lightly tapped it into the corner of my anvil horn so I can set it without it splaying. I also tack weld the ends before welding so they stay together.

Also if you have any tips on cleaning the cable out before weld, I"d love to hear it. I tacked the ends together and loosened the cable on a vice and cleaned it out the best I could with flux and wire brushing.

Lot of Six 3/4" x 8" Wire Rope Tool Steel Cable Damascus Knife Forge Blacksmith. Lot of six 3/4" x 8" sections of US made high carbon IWRC (Independent Wire Rope Core). Wire rope was salvaged from a crane at an old industrial site. Wire rope has a nice strand count and contains no fiber or plastic strands for your Damascus project. Wire rope has been used and is greasy and dirty. If you wish to purchase different lengths and quantities, please send a message along with your request for a quote. Lot of cable is being sold AS-IS. Shipping is free for this item. Thanks for looking. The free shipping is only to the lower 48 states, Alaska and Hawaii will require additional postage. No shipping to PO, APO/FPO.

Lot of Four 3/4" x 12" Wire Rope Steel Cable for Damascus Knife Forge Blacksmith. High carbon steel cable, no rope center, steel core, ends welded. This is new unused cable, has some lube, no rust or dirt, cable stored indoors. Your are buying four (4) 12 inch pieces. Cable is non-returnable and non-refundable you are buying in as-is condition. Perfect for damascus knife making! If you wish to purchase different lengths or quantities email or message me for quote.Thanks for looking!Send me a best offer if you want to purchase more than 1 set

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Damascus steel is tie dye for knives. That’s the heart of the matter, and if that feels like enough for you then you can happily go read about some Damascus steel knife we’ve reviewed. I promise that article is more to the point than this one will be, because this article is mostly about indulging my own nerdy compulsions.

The problem is that there’s more history and science behind the term “Damascus steel” than any other knife steel in existence. So when you try to find anything specific about it, you end up in a sea of confused misinformation, generally propagated by idiot bloggers like myself who know more about how to manipulate an internet search algorithm than what actually goes into making a knife.

John Verhoeven and the work he did alongside bladesmith Al Pendray is possibly the most thorough and successful scientific endeavor to recreate genuine Wootz Damascus steel.

Update:Blade Magazine wrote a good piece on Damascus steel in 2022 called “Who Made the First Damascus” that has a pretty good discussion of the history of pattern welded steel and wootz Damascus. It’s pretty concise (although I’d argue with less damn personality), and they talk to blade smiths who have some great insight, but it still doesn’t quite give enough context or detail about history and steel composition to have satisfied my curiosity when I was first working on this haphazard blog. It’s still a good article that’s worth checking out, and probably provides as much information as most people would care to have on this topic.

One of the first things you’re likely to realize if you know nothing about this at all is that the term “Damascus steel” can refer to two different steels:A pattern welded steel where two or more different steels have been forge welded and twisted together to create a distinctive pattern (Modern Damascus steel),

A crucible steel forged from a single ingot from south India that develops a surface “water” pattern after being forged and thermal cycled (generally called Wootz Damascus).

That’s a rough rewording of the definitions that Larrin Thomas gives in his “5 Myths About Damascus Steel” article (which is a great primer on its own). In that he also refers to modern Damascus steel as “pattern welded steel” and to the crucible version as “Wootz steel”, which seems to be the standard way to distinguish between the two for the competent people who write about this kind of thing.

That word “wootz” has a whole history of its own that I’ll touch on later, but right now we’re just concerned with the question of “which is the real Damascus steel”:

If you’re talking to an especially prickly historian, the answer is that crucible Wootz steel is the real Damascus. That’s the one that started the craze and got everyone trying to make water-patterned blades (unless you’re talking to an even more prickly historian who tells you other countries might have been making similar crucible steels around the same time, but we’ll talk about Anne Feuerbach later).

The real answer, though, is that if you ask a knife maker today for a Damascus steel knife he’s going to make you a pattern-welded steel blade. The best proof of that is probably on Bob Kramer’s site, where he explains what Damascus steel is by calling it pattern-welded steel, then giving a pleasantly concise description of making and drawing out a billet.

When you want a crucible Damascus blade with the more natural looking “water” pattern, there are actually a few custom knife makers like Peter Burt capable of making one every now and then. Whenever I see those knives pop up, though, I see them referred to specifically as wootz Damascus.

Fulad steel hasn’t gotten anywhere near the same kind of attention, and it doesn’t do much here to deepen our understanding of what Damascus steel is, because I’m not even going to attempt to synthesize her work into the discussion as a whole. But it’s worth knowing that the process was apparently more widespread than most people think.

You can thank Dr. Ann Feuerbach’s dissertation Crucible Steel in Central Asia: Production, Use, and Origins for adding this complication (or, for a shorter read, her paper Damascus Steel and Crucible Steel in Central Asia).

That was mostly a matter of good marketing and convenient geography. I think. I really don’t have the expertise to make a new claim about this, though, so I’ll just paraphrase what Ann Feuerbach said about it in her dissertation (and what has since been referenced by a handful of people who have actually read about this, like Larrin Thomas):The word for water in Arabic is “damas” and Damascus blades are often described as having a water pattern on their surface.

What they don’t do is suggest at all that the term started with Crusaders coming back to Europe, which seems to have become one of the big modern assumptions. The term was being used before even the first Crusade happened, and even longer before legends like the sword of Saladin cutting a piece of silk floating in the air in a competition with Richard the Lionheart started circulating.

Without getting too tied up in dates, though, the important thing here is legends like that did spread, and became overblown enough that Damascus weapons developed enough of a reputation that the surface water pattern became a sign of quality.

There’s an excellent documentary by Mike Loades called The Secrets of Wootz Damascus Steel that follows Al Pendray and John Verhoeven trying to develop a consistent method for creating and forging a crucible steel that produces this swirling grain formation.

Thanks mostly to those two, the claim that the “secret to making true Damascus steel has been lost” is mostly false now. While the exact method for making that pattern show up consistently is still up in the air, there are now people like Rick Furrer and Niels Provos who have worked in the past to reproduce Wootz steel with a water surface pattern with various degrees of success.

I don’t know if that means we’ll see Wootz steel in mass production at some point in the future. There are a few groups actively trying to bring the process into the laser age, but for the time being, crucible Damascus steel remains in the territory of historians, metallurgists, and tenacious smiths.

Pattern welding is a pretty old technique in bladesmithing, especially between iron and steel, but it wasn’t always done to copy the Damascus water pattern.

There was apparently a process for it in place on the Iberian peninsula in pre-Roman times based on some of the Falcata swords that have been found there. There’s also evidence that Celtic and Germanic tribes developed a pattern welding method, and the discovery of the Ulfberht swords shows that Europeans were doing this at least as far back as the 9th century.

It would be really easy to say that European blacksmiths saw people going crazy over these water-patterned Syrian weapons and tried to copy the pattern so they could sell their blades at a higher price. It would even make a bit of sense. But I just can’t seem to find enough reliable sources to support that claim, so I’ll jump ahead a few hundred years to the claim that can be backed up.

Moran got knife makers back into forging knife blades and creating their own alloys at a time when the mass production of stamped blades seemed to be pushing that art out of existence, and along with that he brought back the popularity of the word “Damascus”.

Gun manufacturers had been making Damascus gun barrels (sometimes called “twist-steel” barrels) since the 19th century at the latest. There’s a bit of confusion even here about exactly who first started calling pattern welded steel “Damascus steel”, but the idea popped back up during England’s occupation of India, and people started bringing cakes of Wootz steel to the Isles.

The pattern got popular again, and soon smiths and metallurgists started playing around with it. In the early 1800’s, a man named J. Jones got a patent for creating a Damascus gun barrel in a way that would later be called the Crolle Damascus Pattern. Guns like this continued to be made in Britain until about the 1930’s.

People kept writing about the stuff even after Damascus gun barrels stopped being made, but it really wasn’t until Moran dropped into the scene with this Damascus knife in 1973 that the term became truly relevant to everyone again.

When you’re looking at a modern Damascus steel knife that doesn’t have the steel composition in the description, it’s usually safe to say that it’s those two, with the possible variations of 1050 or 1095 traded in as the tool steel.

People jump to the idea that because the process for making Wootz steel is an ancient, lost technique that it must be better, because all old and lost things are better, or that pattern welded steel is better because it’s complicated to make. The truth is that most claims about any kind of Damascus steel being harder or sharper or more wear resistant are unfounded.

Not a lot of experiments have been done in this area, but Verhoven did do a CATRA test to compare the edge on a Wootz Damascus blade to 1086 and 52100 tool steels and AEB-L stainless steel.

Ultimately he concluded that at high hardness both 1086 and 52100 cut better than true Damascus and both have better edge retention, and the Uddeholm AEB-L stainless steel, in broad terms, outperformed all of them at high hardness. Wootz steel did seem to start doing significantly better at a softer hardness, though.

Meanwhile, the Thomas family did their own CATRA test of a pattern-welded Damascus steel made up of AEB-L and 154CM against an edge on a solid piece of each of those steels (detailed at the end of Larrin’s 5 Myths article).

Shockingly, they found that the pattern-welded Damascus performed pretty much right in the middle of each of the steels it was made of: It had a higher edge retention than the softer AEB-L edge, and a lower edge retention than the harder 154CM edge, with an initial slicing ability that was equally centered.

It’s not really fair to say absolutely that Wootz steel is worse than all modern steels and a pattern-welded steel can never perform better than the sum of its parts. These were single experiments done with a small range of materials. But this should give us an educated skepticism of any manufacturer’s claims that their knives perform better because of their Damascus steel.

For what it’s worth, Verhoeven also mentions in his report of the Wootz Damascus CATRA testing that the true Damascus steel blades “from antiquity” likely were better than what was being used by European Crusaders.

It’s possible that European blades were only being hardened to about 40 HRC (which is where Verhoeven said Wootz started to excel) because of the ore and techniques they were using. Pure steel could be tough to come by in the medieval era, especially on a massive enough scale to equip an army, so the ability to make Wootz ingots would have been an incredibly useful technology.

Just for context, the criteria for becoming a Master Bladesmith set by the the American Bladesmith Society are to forge a pattern welded knife with 300 layers that can slice a one-inch rope in half with one cut, chop all the way through a 2×4 without chipping, keep a sharp enough edge through all that to shave hair, and then get bent 90 degrees without cracking.

There are a few basic patterns you tend to see in Damascus blades. You can get a pretty good sense of the possibilities fromthe patterns that Damasteel makes. But the sky’s the limit with highly skilled smiths. Once you start getting into mosaic patterns, Damascus becomes another show altogether. You don’t generally see that in mass produced knives, though.

Master Bladesmith Rick Dunkerley wrote a great article for Blade Mag on some of the different Damascus variations you can make back in 2011. Here’s a rundown of the basic ones he covered:Random: this is where the layers remain flat and a flowing, organic pattern forms during patterning (you’ll see this in a lot of the higher end Japanese kitchen knives).

In most cases you don’t need to take any more care with a Damascus blade than you would with any of your other knives: keep it clean and dry, and maybe put a coat of oil on it every now and then.

Since most Damascus blades are made with a high carbon steel and a high nickel, it makes sense to treat the blade as if it was just a high carbon steel. Chris Reeve’s site actually has a good blog on maintaining Damascus steel knives (even though they don’t seem to make Damascus knives any more), so these tips are adapted from them:Wipe the blade as soon as possible after cutting anything acidic like fruit. Even your finger oils can pose a long term risk if you keep touching the blade without wiping it off.

In that vein, I’d highly recommend getting Larrin Thomas’ book, “Knife Engineering: Steel, Heat Treating, and Geometry” for a great, detailed primer on learning the science behind knife making. Besides the massive drop of comprehensive knife making information, he has a great section on Damascus steel in there.

John Verhoven also wrote a book about his experience trying to create Wootz steel with Al Pendray called “Damascus Steel Swords: Solving the Mystery of How to Make them”, which has a nice mix of science and history tied in with the story of his friendship with Pendray (Verhoeven wrote a bunch of other books on metallurgy that are probably worth reading, but are also crazy expensive).

There are probably hundreds of books on forging pattern welded Damascus, and since I’m not a blade smith myself I can’t say with much certainty which is a good source, but I’ve heard Jim Hrisoulas referenced by actual bladesmiths. He’s done a lot of work in historical weapon making, and written a lot on the topic, so it might be worth checking out his books like “Damascus Steel: Theory and Practice” or “The Pattern Welded Blade: Artistry in Iron” if you want to start learning how to do this stuff.

Specifically, a mosaic pattern called basket weave. The end result should look just how it sounds, like a 90s Safariland holster. First, when I say "damascus" I mean modern damascus, which is technically pattern welded steel. Colloquially it"s called damascus, all "ackchyuallys" aside.

The steel alloys I"m going to use are Crucible Cru Forge V and Uddeholm 15N20. Some thought goes into choosing alloys. First is whether or not they will have a contrast that will allow the pattern to show up when etched in acid. Second, since we"re making knives out of this eventually, is whether the alloys have a similar response to heat treating since you can"t harden them individually once combined. Cru V was developed by Crucible to support the burgeoning custom knife market in the mid 2000s before their bankruptcy, and is no longer made. It"s fantastic in damascus because it etches very dark black, and the vanadium content helps prevent grain growth during the many heating cycles required to make pattern welded steel. 15N20 has a nickel content of 2% and so it resists etching, and therefore forms the "white" layer in damascus. Both respond very well to a heat treat of 1500F, oil quench and 400F temper.

Now, I need to hold these together to forge weld them. To do that I"ll MIG weld them with fairly low heat, I don"t want a lot of penetration because I don"t want the mild steel wire to exist in the final product. This cheap little vise works really great for getting everything tight face to face.

Lots of brushing and fluxing to try and keep the scale out of the billet. You can see it fall away sometimes as the billet is compressed when it"s gotten away from me. I should take a picture of my scale brush. It"s something else. It"s flat bar instead of wire and could be used as a weapon.

View QuoteYes. Forging by hand has it"s place. It"s a fools errand when it comes to making relatively complicated patterns though. I built my press for <$1000 and if my time has any value at all it paid for itself probably the 3rd time I made damascus with it.

Simonetti, Manlio (2002). Matthew 14-28. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press. ISBN 978-0-8308-1469-5. OCLC 47443858. By “camel” here he means not the living thing, the beast of burden, but the thick rope to which sailors tie their anchors. He shows this comparison to be not entirely pointless (as a camel would be), but he makes it an exceedingly difficult matter; in fact, next to impossible.

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The modern connotation of Damascus steel is different from the original Damascus of the past. Historic Damascus steel referred to as crucible stee,l which had a very high carbon content and had a visible surface pattern because of its crystalline structure.Tthis Damascus steel, or Wootz steel, ended up being called Damascus steel because the crusader,s on their way down to the Holy Lan,d would purchase new blades of this superior steel (superior to medieval European steel) in cities like Damascus. The modern connotation, however, is instead different kinds of steels that have been pattern-welded and that display a similar surface pattern when acid etched. The Damascus you will see made here is is of the latter definition. Cable Damascus is perhaps one of the easiest ways to create Damascus steel with a complex pattern. Unlike other techniques, this method requires no folding and essentially comes in its own ready to forge shape.

Like they always say, safety first! Seeing as how this whole process involves forging, grinding and dipping metal into chemicals, it is important to use the proper safety equipment. For the forge welding stage, many people who do any kind of smithing, know the basic safety equipment: gloves, apron, closed toed shoes, etc. Howeve,r one piece of equipment sometimes goes overlooked. Everyone knows that eye protection is important but for this kind of work you need a special kind of eye protection. The above and only picture in this section is of a pair of dydidium glasses. The reason that it is the only picture up there is because just about everybody who works with metal knows the safety basics but rarely do I see people point out this kind of eye protection. Normal goggles are usually fine for most crafts but not for forge welding. The heat required for forge welding puts out a bit of radiation that over the long term can cause vision loss. Dydidium however will block most of the radiation and save your eyes. One final point, dydidium glasses are not the same as welding masks or sunglasses. If you use either of these while forge welding, your pupils will dilate and your eyes will get even more of the radiation.

Before you can forge out your section of cable you have to set it all up. Before it goes in the fire you first have to cut off your section like in the first image. I cut off 3, 12 in sections of 1 inch cable at the time with a chop saw. You can use whatever method you like to cut the cable just be sure that the cable that you use is all steel with no plastic involved and that it is not galvanized as the heat reacting with the plating will produce gas that can make you very sick or even kill you. So keep that in mind when getting cable. Also, if this is your first time attempting cable Damascus you might not want to jump right in to the the larger diameter cable and instead start out with a piece of half inch. You wont be able to make anything more than a toothpick with the results but its a good way to practice without wasting bigger and more expensive cable.

After the cutting, be sure to wrap the ends of the cable with steel wire. This is to keep the section from unwinding during the first parts of the process. Be sure to only use plain steel wire because other wires that are coated or are made of other can melt or react with the heat and just mess everything up.

Everybody who makes Damascus has their own list of steps or additives that seem to make the whole process work for them. I encourage you to go, do some research and discover one that works for you. For me, I spray my cold metal with WD40 until it is just completely soaked and then coat the whole thing with regular borax before putting the sections in the fire. Both the borax and WD40 act to prevent oxidation which can make forge welding impossible. The borax won"t typically stick to metal unless its hot or wet and the WD40 will burn off in the forge so getting the section wet with WD40 and using that to stick the borax on seems to make everything work for me.

Damascus steel when ground down should look just like one solid piece of metal. In order to get the pattern, you need to etch the steel with an acid. There are several options as far as acids go but personally I use ferric chloride. If you only want a very superficial etch, like the one in the cover image, you only need to dip the metal in the acid for about 20 min. I wanted a very deep etch that could actually be felt so I dipped mine for 7 hours. Once you are done with the etch, you need to clean it and neutralize the acid. One of the easiest ways to do that is just to spray Windex on the etched piece after it has been rinsed off. Don"t forget to wear gloves and eye protection for all this. If you want to add some color to the piece, like the last two images in the title, just heat the piece up a bit after the etch until the desired color has been reached.

The piece I made here didn"t require any quenching or heat treating because it is a decorative piece. If you choose to make a blade out of cable Damascus one thing to keep in mind is that when quenched, the steel has a tendency to warp in the direction of the cable twist. If you want a functional piece, make it thick, otherwise you might start with a knife and end up with a corkscrew.

Hi Armeria. Thanks for your informative instructable.I think the warping is caused because the wires of the cable are nearly aligned in one direction and after quenching, the contraction force is also exerted unequally in one direction to cause the warp. Don"t you think folding the cable several times during the forge welding can obviate the problem?

I think that you might be confusing the revealed pattern with having gaps in the steel. Proper forge welding will create a homogeneous billet. The pattern that is shown is the result of acid reacting to the different carbon contents of the former wires that experienced carbon migration before being welded. I hope that this helps!0