san mai Bowie (work in progress)

[Scott Roush]

I welded up this billet a couple of weeks ago and have finally gotten around to grinding it. I'm going with a big bowie.. 10" blade. It is going to a guy who is helping me out in a big way with welding and machining.

So... I'm hollow grinding this thing because the outer layer is so thin and I thought it would be a great way to display the contrast between the forged spine and a polished blade showing the contrasting steels. And I've always liked Joe Keeslars hollow ground fighters anyway. The billet is 15n20/1084/15n20.  The 15n20 is only 1/8" thick so since I was worried about grinding it all away I forged the blade pretty close to the final shape in order to do as little grinding as possible.  I forged the tip down and had no problems with delamination.  But it did start to come apart just below the ricasso so I'm having to grind the hidden tang.

Anyway... What is the best way to etch these two metals to get the most contrast?  You can see in these pictures there isn't a ton of contrast, but the blade isn't hardened yet and it is only ground to 60 grit. I did a test etch anyway with dilute ferric chloride to see what was going on. Not a lot of contrast, but I love that white line between the forge scale and 15n20. I wonder if that will hold after the quench??? I'm assuming that's decarburized steel??

I've seen a lot of 15n20/1084 damascus with huge contrast... so how do you do it???

before etch...

 

after etch...

 

[Scott Roush]

Just realized after reading some other threads that  I may need to dilute my ferric chloride more....

[Scott Roush]

Today I forged the guard I'm gonna use for this. I decided to go with a Civil War style finger guard.  I forged it from my slaggiest of the slag wrought given to me by Aldo Bruno. It is in the picture.... a piece of shipyard chain link.


What a blast forging stuff like that....

[Scott Roush]

oops...