the idea for today's video comes from the comment section nathan Dale posed the question what would happen if we took a Damascus steel ball this is a regular ball bearing and we put it inside a steel canister this is obviously a glass jar but if we put them in oh and then filled the negative space with steel powder and forge welded it together what would the pattern look like i wonder if the pattern would look like some crazy space scene with wild planets now what's interesting about this is as you cut in imagine this is 3D you've taken a slice boom as you take another slice these spheres are going to become bigger these circles might become smaller as you get on the back side of them but like everything is going to progressively change and expose other little elements of it no single slice is going to be the same wonder what we could do to then make art out of that but for now we got to work out how on earth we make a bunch of Damascus balls [Music] right now that's all steel what do you reckon Jamie about us putting some nickel in there little extra shine extra bright sounds naughty we've never done this before nickel in regular steel Damascus oh that's a handy sized bit isn't it there's a thick nickel there thin nickel there there like that it's kind of offset a little bit thin nickel there here [Music] [Music] i lost the bolt it almost killed me that bolt came out and the bolt at the back came out as [Music] well now we got ourselves a big old rambar that big old rambar doesn't look a whole lot like one of these balls it only looks like one of these balls in one plane we need to make it look like that ball in two planes how and how bearing in mind it has to be efficient i'm going to need a lot of these balls i can't just have two balls can't just have four balls even with Jamie's help this goes beyond what Jamie and I could provide ourselves we need dozens of balls the way I see it there are three options at first I was thinking what about we just grind these balls but that is going to be really timeconuming so then I thought what if we made the balls with machining equipment we could turn them we could mill them i've seen there are attachments that people make for turning balls in the lathe i also imagined perhaps using our indexing head and maybe a boring bar over here with the index head rotating in one direction this rotating in another we could cut a sphere but all those things to me seemed like it would take us good chunk of time per ball but then this morning it occurred to me we're in a blacksmith workshop i could forge these balls so if we search for forging balls we can see some of the cool ways it gets done that big ball under a power hammer you have two negative hemispheres top and bottom die it could obviously be done under opened eyes just kind of forging at free form check this out how sick is that they are literally just slicing them off that bar now just like I was saying you rotate something in one direction in the lathe you cut it with a still tool it makes a cylinder but if you rotate it one direction while cutting it with something that rotates in the other direction what does it do it makes a sphere same principle when moving the metal when we're forging it if I have a bottom dye with half a circle in it a top dye with half a circle in it we put our piece of steel in and rotate it while we hammer it is going to cut a groove and forge a ball we conveniently have this set up for insert dyes which sometimes is really annoying but today is going to be blooming perfect let's make up some dyes [Music] what the bro buy a new truck man it's meant to be really good [Music] that's not meant to go that far down that that line there that's the line of death that's how you break one of these power hammers let's line these up in the middle get in there [Music] now I like to put center punch marks on here to make sure that I know which one's the top dye which one is the bottom dye and I think I know what's in this package from my mate Corin Nairock Tools do you remember the gorgeous scribes and deburers that he sent me with my dogs looking at the customs form here I've got a little suspicion about what might be inside here ooh ah is an incredibly fancy and very beautiful optical center punch this is a collaboration between Nyrock and Pasque Makes great YouTube channel you should check it out you put this acrylic dowel in there let's say you had two scribe lines it magnifies and there is a little circle take the acrylic out this hopefully stays in the same place that drops over top whack it with an hammer i'm very happy to now have an optical center punch thank you Corin but that isn't the center punch I was actually thinking I needed for this bit of the project right now so this will go kindly in a drawer the special Corin drawer now grab one of these one center punch up top two center punches on the bottom we'll mark this up so we can cut it right down the middle of that hole sweet we're going to cut some mild steel off and we're going to test it in different diameters and see what forges the best spheres going to start with 30 mm diameter round bar which is what our Damascus is currently sized to it's about an inch and a quarter for our American friends here we go nice and [Music] gentle i think this is too big yeah definitely too big you made like a pumpkin yeah it's We don't need no pumpkins 25 mm this is an inch in diameter oh it's better boys and girls yeah baby ah I went off the dye look what I did yuck i actually think that's too large a diameter still quite pumpkinike 20 mil diameter 3/4 in well I can hardly believe it 20 mil diameter makes a perfect ball could that be any better this needs to be 20 mil in diameter now we can forge the real ones [Music] [Music] that'll be the last one i tell you what I am so happy that we did not machine these things machining this many balls would have taken us a very very very very very long time and that is exactly why we like forging they obviously have their uh little flying saucers still attached so they all need to get cut off and then we've got to grind and smooth them out before we figure out how as efficiently as possible we can get the forge scale off of there so I started off sand blasting and I just didn't get enough of it off so we're driving great i'm I'm happy now that it's been top and tailed and polished up it looks like we got half as many spheres as I thought we would have 29 balls this is the biggest bit of box section that will fit in the V dyes of the hydraulic press and to fill up all this negative space and hopefully preserve the roundness of the balls powder oh yeah it has been a minute since we have done anything with steel powder it's just so wild how do they make steel into such a fine powder molten steel is poured through a small nozzle and disintegrated by a high pressure gas like nitrogen or argon breaking the stream into tiny droplets that solidify into fine particles ah sick this powder is made of good knife steel it is 1095 powder so it's a plain carbon steel with 0.95% carbon it's very similar to the dark layer in our Damascus which is 1080 or 0.8% 8% [Music] carbon so that's the premise suspending Damascus balls in a solid steel powder i've taken everything out of the can cuz I've decided that I don't want anything sticking to this mild steel box so out comes the stainless steel foil very recently we used some white spray paint to avoid the stickage but in this case stay away i'm not feeling it i don't want the potential offging from that white spray paint to saturate through all of this incredible surface area and cause serious issues the stainless steel foil isn't going to off gas the same way especially once we oxidize it it's not going to be able to [Music] stick now we got to make it settle just vibrating it it has got so solid when you've just poured it it's like sand that compacts down like [Music] crazy i've got the box welded up and I've got a handle on it but it's actually a breakaway handle in order to get this to bond nicely in an ideal world I'd be able to hit it from all of the sides we'd be able to take it to the hydraulic press forge it in the big V dyes then flip it up on end like this and immediately smush it under the steam hammer a bit to squeeze it that way you might say Alec just use a pair of tongs there is a challenge with that which is got really limited access between these V dyes to actually be able to hold it in tongs this is now ready to go in the forge while we're spending money getting the forge to heat up burning that propane why not think about how you can make your money the best way to do that is by having a great website to sell your products and showcase your brand which is why I love our sponsor Squarespace because they make it easy peasy you can sell unlimited physical or digital products you remember we recently sold some of our drop forged coins on my Squarespace website and it was a breeze with all the payment options that our customers had but you can also use your Squarespace site to showcase your brand and in our case showcase Jaime's hard work over the last four years of scaring me relentlessly in the workshop you're welcome thank you Jamie i'm so grateful using their handy drag and drop themes we were able to very quickly embed this compilation of all of his scares into our Squarespace website for your viewing pleasure whatever you got going on why there's one more have really mixed emotions about the fact that I pay you to do that to me if you sell your time you can take bookings with Squarespace scheduling you can even run your email marketing campaigns through your Squarespace site so please go to squarespace.com/fort you'll get a twoe free trial give it a shot see if you love it and when you do code forge at checkout gets you 10% off your purchases that includes your domain purchase.pace.com/forge let's get back to it good time oh she's a hot one she's cooking nice and gently does it yeah i do not want to overdo it deform it too much i'm going to take one more heat like that just cuz I'm moving a bit slow before we break off the handle i really hope that forging it in square cross-section doesn't deform the spheres into squares cuz that would be really a shame we're trying to make ball Damascus not cube Damascus but my hope is that we can do this with the least amount of forging possible [Music] [Music] i think I'm going to call it there we'll try and get the jacket off got to take another slice come on baby ah catching in the light you can see some balls there there there there there there let's have a little look see oh my goodness that is exactly what I was hoping to do how wild does that look i think we've done something original for the first time ever oh we just switched out the gator for feric chloride how good is that looking wow you need to put nickel in Damascus more that looks insane isn't that epic look how much that nickel pops so we've got a block that is going to have a continuously changing pattern all the way through it in terms of what we make from it we also don't get to do crazy defamation i think the best thing here is to make a cool piece of art and I'm envvisaging a little panorama a little space panorama out of Damascus steel so I want to get slices of this pattern and set them side by side boom boom boom and weld them into a steel tapestry in order to do that we need to get the jacket off and then we need to forge it into a much squarer neater bar that it is currently because we cannot have any waste this can't be going to the mill we don't have a lot of leeway woo that is so nuts that was powder a few hours ago how sick is that [Music] [Music] little test etch of all these puppies oh I love that one look at all the changes in size oh I actually kind of like that one with only four of them now we got to pick all the best orientations i quite like that i think that's what we're going with i'm going to fusion TIG weld up all the seams so that the joint interfaces can't get any more oxygen in them so this is going to be making a butt weld we're not going to be hammering in the axis of the joints we're actually going to be hammering opposite to them but I have a mild steel plate with little end caps restraining it that'll hopefully allow those joints to stick now what I didn't want is I didn't want our lovely slab of Damascus sticking to that mild steel plate so we slipped a little bit of stainless foil in between them it'll stick a little bit but it won't stick permanently you can see the little remnants of it there you can barely see the foil for me at least this is brand new i have never done a butt weld like that where the joints are like this but we're hitting like that never but I think I've seen Salem Straw do this he's a great follow on Instagram if you want to see beautiful work and so I'm reaching deep into my memory of like one post that I saw years ago in trying to do this well I'm hoping that with clean surfaces hopefully not too much oxygen in there it's going to go but my confidence is not 100% we're going to have to see that looks [Music] epic it looks fairly solid here at the ends where it wasn't perfectly square with the mild steel blockers there's definitely a gap but I can't see any gaps here at the middle joints which is what we want so hopefully that stainless stopped it from bonding between here and here and we can just pop all this out oh that actually doesn't look so good looking on end here you can actually see the joint which is a bit [Music] worrying oh oh that's sick that stainless works so well to keep it separate yeah look at that beauty still not 100% convinced it's going to be very strong but let's grind it down get through those TIG weld [Music] lines looks pretty good but there are some faint lines at the joint question is will this break apart will it be strong enough going to heat it to forge welding temperature and the first thing I'm going to do is whack it like this use its own inertia to see if we can get some more pressure on those weld areas oh it looks [Music] beautiful no that looks bad that ain't good see them [Music] cracks cool let it cool down very concerned about those cracks it might fall apart so I hardened the piece tempered it tried to get some bow out of it and hopped on the surface grinder oh crap I forgot to hit record before going in to a test etch now I did the hardening cuz it gets us a better contrast in finished etch but test etch is unfortunately all I've got time for today and the result is we can see the little flaws in the corners where the butt weld didn't stick they stick out like a sore thumb in the edge nickel proves to be an utterly gorgeous addition to regular steel Damascus it just pops like nobody's business even on that dirty edge it just given that this is a pattern where you can't go forging it into a knife cuz you're going to distort it i'm a bit unsure about exactly what this needs to become with the special Damascus we made in a recent video you guys sounded out in the comments with a phenomenal suggestion so stay tuned for an epic video where we make something cool with that and so I pose the question to you what should we do with this planetary solar system Damascus given the constraints of not being able to deform it otherwise we turn it into ovals and given the constraint of the corners not being super strong let me know down below it's been a pleasure to have your time i've run out of time for this video which means it might just be the perfect time for you to build yourself a website check out today's sponsor at squarespace.com/forge appreciate you all