[TheForge] Powder Damascus

[Mike Spencer]

Here's an interesting bit for the Damascus/pattern-welding guys:

Patterned steel billets by powder metallurgy.  Stack (dribble?) two
kinds of powder (say, a hardenable carbon steel and a hardenable
stainless) just right in a cylinder, add pressure and heat to form a
billet.  Forge or roll the billet.  Instant pattern welded bar stock.

['Ware line-wrap]

http://www.machinedesign.com/ASP/articleLoader.asp?catId=3&path=D%3A%5CInetpub%5Cwwwroot%5CMachineDesign%5Clive%5CMDSite%5CContent%5CIssue%5C10657%5C57611%2Ehtml&strSource=/images/currentissue.jpg

Or you can just go to the main site:

    http://www.machinedesign.com/

and navigate to the Damascus steel article in the current issue
(18-Nov-2004).  Main site requires javascript to navigate and is a
PITA.  The long URL above goes direct to the relevant page without js.

Some impressive photos of their flats and rounds.

So how do you dribble two kinds of metal powder into a pressure
cylinder "just right"?  I wonder if this is an application of the 3D
metallurgical printing tech developed at MIT.  I'll have to email Sam
Allen and ask him if he knows about this.

And to think, there we were, just welding chunks of solid stuff
together a lot of times when we could have had a building full of
automated machinery and computers to do it for us while we drank
whiskey and picked ticks offn the dog.


- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^

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