A couple of weeks back I was booked in to a damascus class with Owen Bush.
I had already done his bladesmithing course and had found it inspirational.
The course was fully booked (as was the bladesmithing course I'd been on).
Well how lucky can you get? For various reasons the other 5 people had to pull out. This left me with one to one tuition
This meant that we managed to get a lot more done than would normally come out of a Damascus course and it also meant that Owen took the opportunity to test out some new techniques of his own with stunning results.
I managed to get three pieces done. The first was all by hand and it gave me a new perspective and appreciation of how much effort would have gone into the original damascus makers pre the power hammer era..
A simple twist and not a huge amount of layers (forgot to count them!)
It etched up nicely
and then I destroyed the tang on the power hammer! Having cut off the mangled end and gone back to the hammer and anvil I managed to make a nice little user blank (thanks Owen from talking me out of that horrible seax idea)
After the first lesson we started using the power hammers and the layers built up quite a bit faster than the hand method. We also finally found the chalk and started counting the layers.
The next billet was made to 342 layers and half of it was angle ground into the surface to produce the laddering - lightly etched and ready for my own forge next year...
The other half was further folded to 1368 layers and we worked on this to make a "kebab knife" as Owen cheekily referred to it It means a whole lot more to me as it's an homage to the knife that made me want to have a go at making a blade myself.
some close ups of the random pattern. No surface manipulation was used to produce this and I absolutely love it...
Owen really got on board with the idea and had a big input into making this blade as good as it is...
I went into the course hoping to learn a technique, fully accepting that it's far from guaranteed that you will produce anything useable. I came away with two good billets and two part finished blades - far more than I could have hoped for.
A huge thanks to Owen for his good nature, patience and discrete criticism.
Can't wait until next year when I can start to take this knifemaking lark a bit more seriously....
I had already done his bladesmithing course and had found it inspirational.
The course was fully booked (as was the bladesmithing course I'd been on).
Well how lucky can you get? For various reasons the other 5 people had to pull out. This left me with one to one tuition
This meant that we managed to get a lot more done than would normally come out of a Damascus course and it also meant that Owen took the opportunity to test out some new techniques of his own with stunning results.
I managed to get three pieces done. The first was all by hand and it gave me a new perspective and appreciation of how much effort would have gone into the original damascus makers pre the power hammer era..
A simple twist and not a huge amount of layers (forgot to count them!)
It etched up nicely
and then I destroyed the tang on the power hammer! Having cut off the mangled end and gone back to the hammer and anvil I managed to make a nice little user blank (thanks Owen from talking me out of that horrible seax idea)
After the first lesson we started using the power hammers and the layers built up quite a bit faster than the hand method. We also finally found the chalk
and started counting the layers.
The next billet was made to 342 layers and half of it was angle ground into the surface to produce the laddering - lightly etched and ready for my own forge next year...
The other half was further folded to 1368 layers and we worked on this to make a "kebab knife" as Owen cheekily referred to it
It means a whole lot more to me as it's an homage to the knife that made me want to have a go at making a blade myself.
some close ups of the random pattern. No surface manipulation was used to produce this and I absolutely love it...
Owen really got on board with the idea and had a big input into making this blade as good as it is...
I went into the course hoping to learn a technique, fully accepting that it's far from guaranteed that you will produce anything useable. I came away with two good billets and two part finished blades - far more than I could have hoped for.
A huge thanks to Owen for his good nature, patience and discrete criticism.
Can't wait until next year when I can start to take this knifemaking lark a bit more seriously....
