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Forge Welding Japanese Style Blades

Everybody has heard about modern replicas of Japanese swords being
"folded" or "forge folded" in imitation of the folding techniques used in
making traditional Japanese blades. But frequentl y people don't really
have a clue what this means.
As a practical matter, it means that a blade has a whole lot of layers of
steel, leaving a visible pattern on the blade But how is it done?
The answer...forge welding.
So what is forge welding? Everybody is familiar with the sort of welding
that's done with a torch or an arc welder. But the kind of welding used in
making swords is a totally different animal. It's called forge welding.
Forge welding is a process by which steel is heated in a forge, then
hammered or squeezed together. At which point the steel bonds and what
once was a number of individual pieces of steel is now one solid piece.
If different kinds of steel are used, the original pieces of steel will be visibly
differentiable after they are shaped into a knife. When sufficient number of
layers have been forged, the surface of the blade will appear to have a
"grain."
A typical "forge-fold ed" blade has about a thousand layers of steel. (Note:
this article doesn't seek to explain traditional Japanese forge-welding
techniqu es. Traditional Japanese blades are made from a raw form of steel
known as tamahagane. This steel is refined through a forge-welding
process. Once it's been refined to a certain point, it's welded more or less
the same way that I weld modern steel. But it should be clearly understood
that I'm not describing the traditional Japanese steel-making process here.
I will write another article later, in which I describe strictly traditional
Japanese welding techniques.)
So. Here's how I make high layer forge-folded steel in my shop.
I begin by taking two long bars of 1/8" by 1" high carbon steel, each with

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slightl y different carbon levels. For Japanese-style blades I'll often use
1050 and 1095 steel. I then grind all mill scale off the steel, so the clean,
bare steel is revealed. Then I cut the long bars into between ten and
twenty pieces of steel, each of which is six or seven inches long. I then
stack them on a 1/4" thick bar of 1095, alternating steel types as I go.

Next, I use a MIG welder to run a small weld bead up each corner of the
stack. I don't want to weld too much or I'll contaminate the billet. But if I
don't weld enough, the billet will expand and break the welds during the
initial heat.
After the weld is made, I insert the steel into my forge. My forge is a
cylindrical propane forge, capable of reaching temperatures in the
neighborh ood of 2300 to 2400 degrees Fahrenheit. I want the atmosphere
to be relatively neutral -- that is, not too heavy on fuel and definitely not too
heavy on oxygen. Too much oxygen, in particular, is fatal to forge welding
because it causes iron oxide scale (Fe2O3) to form on the surface. And
scale won't weld.
Once the billet begins to heat up, I pull it out and coat it with powdered
anhydrous borax, a fluxing agent, which both protects the surface of the
steel from oxygen and dissolves the scale, allowing it to run off the surface
of the steel.
In this photo, the billet is
pretty hot...bu t not there yet.
The little bubb les of flux are
still sticky looking. At welding
temperature, they'll be much
wetter looking, dancing on
the surface of the steel.
I continue to heat the steel
until it reaches a temperature
around 2400 degrees. At that
point it is a bright yellow,
verging on white. The borax
flux begins to boil on the
surface of the steel. I then pull the billet out of the forge and quickly

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squash it in my hydraul ic forge press.

A hydraul ic forge press, for those who don't know, is a machine for
squashing things. Hard. My press puts about 50,000 lbs of mojo on the
work. The way my dies are designed, this yields a pressure of roughly
25,000 lbs per square inch on the billet.
I don't smash the billet too hard on the first weld. Instead, I just give it a
quick bump, feed the billet in a little further, bump it again, then a little
further and another bump. This is all that is required to make the weld. If
you press too hard, you're likely to shear the welds.
Here I'm taking the folded billet out of the forge. I'm about to stick it into my
press. That's the black thing behind me in the picture.

I then draw the billet out a little, reflux and insert it into the forge again.
Generally I'll do a second drawing operation, making sure that the billet is
nice and even. Very small differences in the width of the billet can cause
problems later on.
Once the billet has been squared up and drawn out to a length of ten
inches or so, I'll use a cutting die and chop it in half, leaving a small web of
steel to connect the two pieces. Then I'll flux up the surface which is about
to be welded, stick it in the forge for thirty seconds or so, pull it out, and
wire brush the flux off. This helps clean off impurities that might cause
inclusions and other flaws in the weld.
Then I use my hand hammer to fold the pieces over until they come
together like two jaws. I re-flux the surface to be welded, hammer it all the
way shut, and stick it back in the forge. I'm very careful to make them as
square and neat as possible. If the two halves of the billet don't mate up
very well, you're likely to get welding flaws.
After this, it's just repetition. Weld it, forge it, draw it, cut it, weld it again.
So here's the math. Let's say we start with sixteen pieces. After the first
fold the billet now has 32 layers. Two folds, 64. Three folds, 128. Four
folds, 256. Five folds, 512. Six folds, 1024. Seven, 2048. And that's

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roughl y where I quit most of the time.

At this point, all the welding is complete. But the billet is still very short and
fat. You might be able to make a hammer out of it...but certainly not a
blade. If it's been folded longitud inally, it's probably around 10 to 12
inches. If it has been folded length wise, it may be as short as 4 or 5
inches. In either case it's still between one and two inches thick.
Therefore I then forge out the billet to a workable length with my press,
drawing the billet out about three or four times its length into a bar. With a
thousand layers in the bar, each "layer" of steel is now roughly one
four-thousandth of an inch thick. I put the word layer in quotes, because
the steel is now one single structure, with the layers existing simply as
residual evidence of the original components of the billet.
Here's a picture of what it looks like once it's forged into a blade and
polished.

The white misty area on the top is the hamon or hardened area of the blade
(which has nothing to do with forge-welding, but which is a standard
feature of Japanese style blades). The subtle streaks and swirls of light
and dark are the hada -- or grain pattern -- caused by the forge-welded
layers.
Unfortunatel y the terminology of forge welded blades is not very clear.
There are a number of confusions that can come up when talking about
welding schemes. I prefer not to use the term "forge-fold ed" myself. I
prefer to refer to "high layer forge-welded" steel. This distingu ishes it from
conventional damascus steel of the sort used by Western knife-makers,
which generally has a somewhat lower layer count.
There are various other welding schemes which add to the confusion. The
traditional Japanese blade contained two separate welding operations. The
first served to produce the steel. The second forge welding operation was
used to produce the billet. There were a variety of welding schemes
includ ing san-mai (three piece), kobuse (a sort of hot dog-style
arrangement in which a soft, ductile, low carbon steel is welded into the
center of hard, high-carbon jacket) and various others.
These same welding schemes can be used with modern mono-steels
steels. A high carbon piece can be jacketed in two low carbon pieces to
form a san-mai blade, for instance.
Are there other forge welding techniqu es? You bet. Steel cable, of the sort

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used to haul elevators up and down, can be forge welded to produce a

surface pattern that looks like reptile skin. Or that same steel cable can be
welded into billets, drawn out, cut and stacked and then re-forge-welded.
When taken to relatively high layers, this can mimic a traditional Japanese
hada quite effectively.
Western smiths have made damascus in cans out of steel powder,
producing ridiculousl y complex patterns. And then there's wootz steel, a
type of steel made in crucibles which develops a pattern that can easily be
mistaken for the product of forge-welding.
If you're interested in purchasing an existing blade from the gallery or
ordering a custom piece, click the ORDER INFORMATION button.

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