Can I Forge Stainless San Mai By Hand?

[00:00:01]I opened just in time.

[00:00:03]>> What's going on, everybody? Welcome back. Thanks for being here. Thank you for coming to hang out with me. What are we doing today?

[00:00:10]Um you guys probably know, if I mean, unless you can't read, we are doing san mai today. I have wanted to do this for a very long time. [music] Three pieces, but there's a catch. I'm going to try and do this all by hand. And what I mean by that is just my hammer and my anvil because I don't have a press, but also I want to see if it can be done. And so we've got some stainless steel, 440C stainless steel, and a piece of 52100, >> [music] >> which if you guys know is my go-to carbon steel. Now, [music] I have heard and I have read that doing a three-piece san mai is actually quite difficult because the carbon steel doesn't really want to stick to the stainless steel. That's why people will tend to do I think what's called go mai.

[00:01:01]Don't quote me on that or quote me on it. Don't care. But they'll take nickel silver and put it in between these layers because the steel will want to forge weld better to that than it will to these three pieces here. [music] So, we are going to try it without doing that because I really like the look of just three steels. I think it looks really good. There's tons of benefits of doing a knife like this.

[00:01:27]The main one being you get a stainless steel jacket on the outside with a carbon steel core. Carbon steel has great edge retention. It's very strong.

[00:01:37]And then you got the benefits of stainless steel. So, you know, what's not to like? This thing is having a hard time focusing on my face.

[00:01:44]New camera.

[00:01:45]I'm still trying to figure it out. It's having a hard time focusing on me right now. Anyways, I have no idea what I'm doing. So, we're going to learn together. And sometimes learning is failing.

[00:01:56]Let's hope it's not this time around.

[00:01:59]Let's head over to the forge, shall we?

[00:02:02]Well, before we do anything, I think I need to finally address the big crack in my forge.

[00:02:10]Been too long.

[00:02:12]This is only going to be my second time welding, so um yeah, judge me as if I were professional.

[00:02:19]>> [music] [music] [music] >> See if this picks me up. Looks like it's picking me up.

[00:02:55]All right, y'all. I think I fixed my mic. Second video we're using it, and I didn't know that there was a noise canceling setting for surrounding sound.

[00:03:04]But, I think we got it. So, here's the plan.

[00:03:07]I have my stainless with carbon core san mai.

[00:03:12]I'm waiting for the forge to heat up, and from what I've seen and read online, I heard this is very, very tricky. So, what I'm going to do is get it up real hot, and then I'm literally going to come over here, and I'm just going to press it down with my hammer to hopefully I can get everything to stick before I start really hammering on it, because I want Well, I want it to stick.

[00:03:37]So, I'm just going to try and squish it with my hand instead of hammering it and having it having like risking it just pop out pop the welds open. So, that's what I've seen a few people do.

[00:03:48]That's what I'm going to try. Hopefully it goes good. I think I think we can pull it off. And by we, I mean me.

[00:03:56]Okay, we are at 10 and I'm going to go for the first squish.

[00:04:01]I'm literally just going to lean down onto it with my hammer. That's it.

[00:04:08]All right, here we go.

[00:04:13]This is not working.

[00:04:18]All I did was burn my glove.

[00:04:21]I feel like that didn't do anything.

[00:04:23]All right, forget my plan.

[00:04:25]We're just going to go back to good old-fashioned hammering and hopefully hopefully that works.

[00:04:32]Going to do a few light taps, nothing crazy.

[00:04:48]I don't typically like to use borax because it really messes up the forge.

[00:04:54]It like melts it into glass and then eats away at the base of the forge, but for the purposes of this, I'm going to use it just like a tiny bit.

[00:05:42]Well, this did not work.

[00:05:50]I don't know if you can see the gaps in there, but legitimately, I think none of it welded, which is very very not good.

[00:06:01]As you guys saw, it did not weld up at all. At like at no point. There's no point of contact here that has been welded. Which, if it was going to go wrong, that's probably the best case scenario because now I'm going to take these layers apart, clean them, weld them back together, and try again, believe it or not. But, what I learned was I should have welded literally all the way around to seal up so that no oxygen can get in there because with stainless and carbon, these two, they don't really want they don't want to stick together. So, you need to make it an oxygen-free environment to give yourself the best opportunity for them to forge weld. So, I'm going to peel these apart, clean them, weld them back together, and we're going to try again.

[00:06:50]I learned a valuable lesson.

[00:06:52]I was way too confident with that one.

[00:06:56]That's all right.

[00:06:57]We'll try again.

[00:07:01]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> I've got the billet welded up all the way around. It's really ugly, but we're going to try for round two.

[00:07:57]So, I was going to put this in, but I should probably heat the forge up first.

[00:08:07]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Okay.

[00:08:33]>> [music] [music] >> I hope you guys can hear me with this mic.

[00:08:43]But, it's really bright here, so it's hard to see the color of the steel.

[00:08:49]Trust me though, it's at 10.

[00:08:51]Uh so much so that I have to wear a glove because on my hammer hand, which is the hand that's moving in and out of the way, when my hand gets close to that billet, it's radiating so much heat that it actually starts to burn the outside of my hand.

[00:09:05]So, it's plenty hot. I've given it a few heats now.

[00:09:11]I want to say I think it's it's forge welded, but I said that last time and it popped open, so we're just going to keep going and uh we'll see what it we'll see what comes out the other side, I guess.

[00:10:23]>> Okay, guys, it's the next morning and I let this thing sit overnight just to cool down and let it normalize in the forge.

[00:10:31]I'm really [snorts] not sure if it worked. There's one area here.

[00:10:35]I'll get a close-up shot, but it looks like the weld may have popped open while I was forging, which if it did, it's going to be devastating because I don't have any more steel to play with at the moment. So, we got to cut this thing open and have a look.

[00:11:18]Well, as you guys saw, it did not weld.

[00:11:22]I think it welded in some spots, but that one whole side, I don't think it welded up at all. And even though there's some spots that it looks like it it welded, I'm not even going to waste my time because um that means structurally it's just probably not the greatest across the board and I could, you know, finish a knife finish forging a knife and then go to quench it and the layers will just pop apart or it could crack, there could be micro stresses and micro fractures and all that kind of stuff. So, I'm not even going to mess with it.

[00:11:56]I'm currently sitting here contemplating if I should give it another go. I don't have any steel on me at the moment, so I'll have to order some and it might be here by the end of the week. I don't know at the moment.

[00:12:07]You'll know in a few seconds, probably. Oh, this is tough. This is one of those moments where it's like it's really tough and I'm not getting it right, but I want to get it right. I want to be able to forge san mai. This is stainless, by the way. I don't know if I've mentioned that. Stainless on the outside, carbon steel on the inside. So, I think I mentioned that. Anyways, give me a second and uh we'll see what happens.

[00:12:36]All right, everyone. So, we are going to try this a third time.

[00:12:42]Third time's the charm, all that stuff.

[00:12:44]It's been a few days since the last attempt. So, I've had some time to reach out to people, I've had some time to do some research and figure out what I'm doing wrong or what I can do to get this to really, really stick. Now, first things first, I will say if you've been following along on my uh Tik Tok or my YouTube shorts, a lot of people are saying use a hydraulic press, uh do this, that, and the other, but the whole point of this is to do it by hand because I don't have hydraulic press or a power hammer and a lot of you don't as well. So, I really want to see if I'm able to do this by hand and so that is the goal here. Why am I doing stainless? Another question is because I want the benefits of the stainless jacket with the carbon core. I think that is like the ultimate sort of knife for a kitchen knife. You have the stainless on the outside and you have the carbon steel on the inside for a wicked edge. Um yeah, I could do wrought iron or I could do carbon on carbons san mai, but I mean, then you don't get that stainless. So, I'm trying to do stainless. I'm fairly certain I could do carbon because you it's not as difficult to forge weld carbon to carbon as it is stainless to carbon. So, that being said, there is also a another way that people have done san mai by adding a fifth layer, so another layer on each side, essentially making it go mai. It is a piece of pure nickel and it's literally it's like a piece of like a piece of tin foil. It is so thin that do you even really call it a layer? So, by doing this, I mean, technically, it's go mai. Come on.

[00:14:41]This is not really a layer compared to this. Like, what are we really talking about here?

[00:14:49]So, let me run you through my plan.

[00:14:52]We are going to cut a piece of stainless steel in half, 6-in 6-in, and then I'm going to cut a piece of my carbon steel, 6 in as well.

[00:15:05]I'm going to cut this in half, and this will go in between the the stainless and the carbon like that. So, the reason we put the nickel shim in between the stainless and the carbon is from what I understand, it'll stop the carbon from moving into the stainless too fast. Now, the last thing or the last two things I've got to do is obviously clean the steel. So, I'm going to clean the steel, clean the faces of the steel, wipe them down with acetone to make sure everything's nice and prepped. Sandwich them together real tight and then weld all the way around.

[00:15:40]So, entirely around it to prevent any oxygen from getting in there. Then, the last thing I got to do is stick it in the forge.

[00:15:47]And people have recommended heating it up to forge welding temperature and letting it sit for about 20 minutes.

[00:15:53]Seems like a lot, but you need to give the the those three five layers enough time to heat up and actually melt into one piece. Then, I'll take it out, lightly tap it, make sure everything's nice and tight. And hopefully, we should have a forge welded piece of stainless san mai. All that being said, let's give this one more shot. I hope it works.

[00:16:21]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Okay, it's time to heat the forge up and get this thing going. It's been welded shut all the way around. So, and I've checked for pinholes.

[00:17:35]If this don't work, well, then this one's probably on me.

[00:17:41]>> [music] >> It is at temperature.

[00:17:52]Uh now, we're just going to wait about 20 minutes for this thing to really soak through, apparently.

[00:17:59]But, the forge is spitting fire.

[00:18:10]All right, it's been in there for 18 minutes.

[00:18:14]At 20 minutes, I'm going to pull it out and give it just some light taps.

[00:18:18]And I didn't weld like a something to hold on to with my tongs just cuz I wanted to weld all the way around it. So, I'll tap one half, throw it back in for maybe another two to five minutes, and then I'll tap the other side. And I'll just slowly work it back and forth, and then hopefully we have a welded billet.

[00:18:36]So, I'm very nervous.

[00:18:45]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Okay.

[00:20:18]Um it is the next morning and this piece has been sitting in the forge Well, forge hasn't been on, but I heated it up, did like a few makeshift normalizing cycles just to take some of the stress out of the steel, especially because it's stainless. Then I heated it up, left it in the forge, shut it off, let it cool down with the forge, >> [music] >> and now we're going to see if it is forge welded. And I got to say I have high hopes for this one. There's nothing immediately that looks that would make me think this didn't work.

[00:20:55]So, we are going to cut it open and have a look inside.

[00:21:44]>> So, there you have it, guys. Where is Where is the steel? Here it is. One homogeneous piece of steel, san mai.

[00:21:54]>> [music] >> And stainless san mai at that. And I was able to do it by hand. Ah.

[00:22:00]Just takes a lot of prep, a lot of proper welding, proper forge welding.

[00:22:07]>> [music] >> Uh stainless steel is very, very, very finicky. It's a It's a pain in the ass from what I've come to learn. And so, you really need to be careful when you're trying to forge weld stainless steel and carbon steel.

[00:22:20]>> [music] >> Um This makes me realize how easy Damascus was. Like, the Damascus I did literally just align, align, align, and it forge welded. Can't do that with stainless. So, I guess I will have to forge a knife out of this or try.

[00:22:39]Uh will it be a video? Probably.

[00:22:43]So, stay tuned for that. Successfully forged san mai, stainless san mai by hand.

[00:22:49]>> [music] >> I know it's technically five layers, so it's go mai.

[00:22:53]Come on. Please. Just give me this one, okay?

[00:22:58]I was doing it by hand, and it's stainless, and it's the The time I've ever forged stainless and like my the fourth well, by the end of it, maybe fifth time I've ever used a welder. So, please cut me some slack, okay? I'm just doing my best. Anyways, guys, that's all I've got for you for this one and I will see you maniacs in the next one.

[00:23:21]Peace.