Mokume gane

I just tried my hand at making some mokume gane. Its still at an experimental phase so it has just a few layers, but it came out surprisingly good!

A press is pretty useful for consolidating the billet, and generally just pretty as you can see below.

Started out with 12 layers of copper, bronze and nickel silver, which had to be meticulously sanded and cleaned.

Stick them between some stainless steel torque plates, in a controlled temperature forge (by the way, this is my horizontal forge on a modified sidearm venturi burner going up to 1140 C at only 30 psi or 2 bar).

And voila, after some press work, forging, and sanding a pretty acceptable mokume plate. You might notice that no bronze appears in the final product, that's because bronze melts at around 600 C while the billets needs about 900 C to weld, so upon pressing it the, by now molten, bronze was squished out of the billet (ending up like really thin bronze wafers or chocolate chip like forms on my shop floor).

So the next try should maybe be without bronze and with a lot more layers... 

I'll keep you posted. By the way, for those of you that have no idea of what I am talking about, google mokume gane on wikipedia, 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mokume-gane

or have a look at the following article "Mokume for the Bladesmith"

http://www.knifenetwork.com/workshop/tut_mokume_jloose.shtml

or another good post, from which the first image in this post originates

http://www.faceters.com/askjeff/mokume.shtml


Addendum: I have come a long way since this post, but I see people being led to this one by google. For more info and details, you might want to check my other mokume gane posts such as the following:

http://gaijinto.blogspot.com/2011/02/silver-copper-mokume-gane-pictorial.html