WILD AND CRAZY DAMASCUS

With an abundance of damascus steel being forged eevery day, ma m kers of pattern-welded blades are ccontinuously developing new, exciting patterns to set their w work apart. Often, the wilder and crazier the pattern, the more attention it gets. Forging a wild pattern, however, is far from a wild process.

I talked to four bladesmiths making some of the craziest patterns, and each of them expressed that it’s all about precision. A smith needs to start with a plan and meticulously execute every step of the process in order to achieve a final piece with the optimal optical impact.

NIGHT FURY

To create his Night Fury pattern, Niko Nicolaides transformed a straight-laminate billet into a complex mosaic one using two different forging techniques. The first technique might be called a “C-bar manipulation” because it forms a symmetrical series of nested C-shapes in the end of the bar when performed on a straight laminate b billet. Starting