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Hi all, Clearing up space to fund other Damascus knife purchases. (Would be interested in trade and any others for sale.) Grip is made of animal bone (I believe camel). Beautiful Damascus steel blade. Asking £75. Thanks

Ive been itching to have a go at damascus steel for a while now. i did try once before by hand and got as far as setting the initial welds but they started to open up whilst drawing out. So this is the first proper attempt using my hydraulic press. I started by cutting two different types of steel to size i used 15N20 and 1095. i then stacked them up and welded the billet at each end. Before heating up I soaked the billet in parrafin, this helps reduce oxidisation during the heating process, as well as having a reducing flame and using borax before the billet is red hot. So I bought it up to forge welding temperature and set the welds, i did this three times just quick presses and then back in the heat to make sure everthing has stuck. I wanted to create feather pattern damascus which was probably a bit ambitious for a first try but Ive seen lots of videos and read a lot of articles on the process so was fairly confident ( famous last words). After i was sure i had a solid billet i rotated it 90 degrees so that the layers were now sitting vertically rather than horizontally rounded the corners and drew it out. cut it into three and re stacked and welded it together. I cut of the end and dipped into a mixture of ferric chloride and water to show the pattern so far. you can see how the layers are horizontal and the corners are rounded. when this is stacked again it will start to form a W pattern. repeated the same process of heating, boraxing setting the welds, drawing out and cutting and re stacking. This is the W pattern starting to form. repeated the process again. I cut the billet into 4 this time so thats now 36 layers. repeat same process again. Feather pattern is a mosiac style damascus which means before drawing it out for the last time it is cut into tiles stacked up tall and then flattened out to reveal the pattern that was hidden internally. With feather pattern you also have to split it down the middle and then re weld together, this seam that is formed is meant to look like the center or the quill of the feather. Stacked into 7 so now at 252 layers. I made this out of an old cross pein hammer i had for splitting the billet. Now up until this point everything had gone smoothly, I'd had no trouble reaching welding temperature and all welds had gone really well. The next bit all went a bit wrong, I think it was a combination of being slightly low on gas and how tall the stacked billet was. I had trouble setting the initial welds which meant the billet ended up being a lot flatter and squarer than I intended, i didnt get any photos of this process as i was pulling my hair out a bit trying to rectify the problem. i eventually got it welded, split down the middle and re welded back together again. i then drew the billet out and dipped in the ferric chloride to see the pattern. I was really pleased with the way it looked, although it wasnt exactly what i had intended it was still a great pattern. But....I dont know if you can see them but unfortunately there were quite a few cracks all along the billet which made it pretty much scrap. But i thought sod it and started to make it knife like anyway just to see what might have been. This was back in September, and since then have been working on some other projects that i will put up at some point, will also have another go at this in the next few weeks ensuring that i have enough gas to get the job done properly and hopefully end up with a crack free knife.