Alan Longmire

You can turn lead into gold. All you need is a very large particle accelerator and a lot of patience. I seem to recall it took Fermilab a month of gentle proton bombardment to turn 1/10 gram or so of lead foil into radioactive gold...

Good to see you back, Einar! VERY nice work!

Looks great, though!

Joel offers good advice, as usual. The spark test is almost impossible to do well with an angle grinder. It calls for a large-ish stone wheel grinder (or a belt grinder) running around 1350-1600 RPM for ease of seeing the actual pattern. Angle grinders at their smaller wheel size and much faster RPM tend to make a dazzling spray of sparks on whatever you're cutting. All I could tell was the mystery steel is alloyed more highly than the rebar, and a bit differently than the 5160. Could be 6150, often used for heavy truck springs, could be AR plate, used for the edge of road grader blades and such. 6150 is great, although hard to forge. AR plate is not good for blades or forging.

Now that's a billet! I can tell you have a power hammer.

Did you add anything to the wrought, or is it just twisted wrought? Either way, you really need to bolt down your vise, the twists absolutely have to be tight, a minimum of six to eight lines per inch. And the starting size of the bar really needs to be close to the finished size of the blade, you really can't do much drawing or forging down to the pattern or it'll go off big time. For a multibar pattern 3/8" square is the biggest you can really do and expect the pattern to be relatively unchanged. I usually try to have them between 1/4" square and 3/8" square after grinding/forging. In other words, if you're gonna call it that, you have some work to do. If you just want to say "inspired by," then all you need to do is even up your twists and make sure the bar is of uniform size first. And you may want to throw another alloy in the mix. Wrought alone gives a very subtle effect. Adding high-phosphorus wrought makes it stand out a lot more (darker etch), as does adding mild (bright etch), 15n20 (also bright), or 10XX (dark etch). A few posts down in this thread you can see how I did it on a fantasy piece using semi-authentic techniques with low-P/high-P wrought and 15n20 (and I know, 15n20 isn't authentic, but neither is a coal forge ): There's also a long description by JPH somewhere in the 'Is your beard still burning" thread down in Fiery Beards. And all of Emiliano's posts from the last few years, and so on. You just have to decide how "authentic" you want it to look, and prepare your core bars accordingly.

Yes, that should harden well. You have to be fast, though. Less than one second to get it from 1475 degrees to below 900 degrees or it won't fully harden.

I should also mention that if you think 52100 is hard to move under the hammer, 304 will set you straight.

Oh, that's still going on. People are still people, after all. Not a lot you can do with 'em.

The idea that the earth's magnetic field is enough to warp a blade is ludicrous. About the only thing that happens magnetically is that someone could, in theory, tell what direction you were facing by examining the magnetic flux lines the way they do with rock formations. Of course, if you ever stick a magnet to it afterwards you'll erase that data. In other words, if this were a thing, you'd have to set up your hard drive facing exactly the same direction relative to magnetic north or your data would get corrupted. And that isn't an issue, is it?

All you guys are doing cool stuff! I'm stuck behind a desk...

That will work fine. Just don't quench it! 304 anneals by quenching just like copper.

One of my favourite places! My wife and I have spent a fair amount of time in Tintagel doing research at St. Nectan's Glen, and the hop over to Boscastle is always fun. As long as you don't meet a tour bus on that hill out of town, that is... That last shot is great! Is that from the SW coast path?

What Geoff and Jerrod said.

The term there was "hada," Japanese for the pattern in tamahagane (and multifolded monosteel) blades. As in, if the pattern that shows in the final polish looks like wood grain, that's mokume hada. So they weren't even using it correctly. Big surprise there!