Some of my knives...

[Mike Blue]

By request, here are a few of the things I've done over the years. Tried to keep them small so they don't soak up bandwidth. The picture quality could be better.

The first is all pattern welded materials except the titanium liners. The second, patterned materials and pearl. The third is a small utility knife with mokume bolsters and mammoth ivory. The fourth is a utility chef's knife with low layer count and koa wood handle. Number five, most recently I've been working on making my own steel using traditional methods. That stuff is going into Japanese style blades.

[FiReSTaRT]

Great work Mike. Elegant, yet functional

[kd5tmu]

Beautiful knives!

[Lancer]

You're trying to make your own tamahagane?!?!

WOW!

[Mike Blue]

Not trying, doing. The material runs about 1.6% carbon on average with the nearest minimum of other alloying elements. With my good friends helping, we're up to about the 20th burn or so and getting a good 35 lbs of bloom each time. We're still in what I call the experimental stage, working on air flow, temperature, consistency of the steel etc. It's a two day job and not for the faint of heart.

[xChris]

Not trying, doing. The material runs about 1.6% carbon on average with the nearest minimum of other alloying elements. With my good friends helping, we're up to about the 20th burn or so and getting a good 35 lbs of bloom each time. We're still in what I call the experimental stage, working on air flow, temperature, consistency of the steel etc. It's a two day job and not for the faint of heart.

N I C E ! ! ! !

[Joe Chandler]

Mother Effing Pimp! Nuff sed.

[Bruno]

Impressive work. truly.

Btw, I have seen on NG how tamahagane is made. It is a 3 day process, and the (very old) smelt master monitors it the entire time without going off to sleep.

[FiReSTaRT]

That may be overdoing it. You could probably get away with catching a few winks of sleep. Then you could uhmmm donate a dai-katana for my uhmm ninja uhmmm business

[Mike Blue]

I'm only involved in 35 lb blooms, but that's still a day to setup and a good eight hours burning. Forging to prep the material comes after that. The Japanese guys (most of whom are late 70's years old) are producing a 2500 lb bloom in 72 hours. Now that's impressive.