[TheForge] Powder Damascus

[Andrew Vida]

I'm not sure why this has been regarded by some with such fascination. 
It's nothing much more or less (depending on how you look at it) from 
good old fashioned sintering.  In fact I really don't see any essential 
difference at all.  Sintering has been done for what, 100 years or more?

Mike Spencer wrote:
> 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
>