Daniel Cauble

I'll be making more in time. I can probably make a few paring knives and sell them exclusively here in the future.

This is the saya for the project.

Unfortunately i cannot use it until i finish up this long project ive been working on which is finally nearing completion. I think a sakimaru is in order for this new steel though. I like to make japanese style kitchen knives and frequently take steels to 64+ range with hand ground geometry. Very thin edges on most. The single bevel knives like yanagiba or the aforementioned sakimaru have even thinner meat behind the edges. Very delicate knives. I've only made a few like this but not a sakimaru, which i have a desire to do.

Yea, I've got a stick of it sitting here now. I'm most interested in the topend hardness and toughness in relation. At 67-68rc, I can knock back my geometry and sharpening angle a few degrees - hopefully.

Other side

Yes it is indeed. The dendritic structure was broken down and spheroidized and then coaxed into bands through specific forging :]

This is a small "herb chopper" I made recently from one of my recent ingots. 1.6% C with a lamellar water pattern. Bog oak and titanium pants.

The steel is really hard to ignore

Coffee pagination.

Final polishing and etch. This is pre-coffee etch. I hope you enjoy the silky nature as much as i do.

Thanks guys!!

One day I hope this thread and 10 years of smelting will get me a flaming beard :0

It's almost as if it allows the adjacent steel to reach eutectic and then stops.

Yes as I see your explanation of the process better here than on FB, I see thay Alan is right. They are doing a direct reduction process. Not really sure why they use borax in this when all you really need is silica. The method of adhering the cast to the iron is neat. Never heard of it as a process as Alan points out though until now. It's similar to how I combine cast iron made in the hearth to actual oroshi steels. Piling them on and welding at lower end heats before the cast crumbles and after a few heats of this, it diffuses enough into the steel to behave with the rest of it. I fully believe that in the beginning, the welded steel to the cast actually allows it to forge. Much like the ductility imparted to steel when you forgeweld iron to it in sanmai. When crossing into really high carbon ranges and cooling slowly, you create widmenstatten cementite. I create these structures in my 1.5-3% steels and cast irons in oroshigane. The only issue with these structures present in the steel is that it is seemingly difficult to break down and diffuse the cementite into adjacent welded steels or irons without high heat. Even then, I've had it still leach out carbon much slower than cementite in grain boundaries. To me, this is why his mix of that material and something like wrought shows a distinct difference of light and dark. The excess cementite hasn't diffused into the lower carbon irons enough to break apart and this etches bright. I took a micrograph of the cross section of one of my oroshogane blades that used material like this and behaved as I described and it really look like this. It may also explain why I was having weird spectro analysis on some of my oroshigane. Areas after folding a bar 4-5 times had concentrations of ~.5% C, and others much, much higher. This steel in micro below was 2 different billets thst were independently folded 6 times and then alternated stacked on eachother in a 4 layer stack and folded 6 more times. Notice that carbon even after 6 folds did not diffuses readily into adjacent material. Edit: Orrrrr it's something Phosphorous related. ???