Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we're back to talk about pattern welding
and that is where you get two dissimilar steels forge weld them together etch the result and if
you've manipulated them nicely you end up with some pretty groovy patterns. This was made by my
friend and very good pattern welder Owen Bush. But earlier in the year i did a film with Owen about
sword that he'd done for an author J C Duncan and his book A Song of Steel. That was a complicated
sword sort of viking inspired sword but we talked through a lot about the pattern welding process
but as is ever the way a lot of that ended up, because it wasn't really for that, film on the
edit room floor so we've brought it back because it is an interesting subject brought it back put
it together here and so really this is the outtake of Owen demonstrating and showing how to Pattern
Weld. How you do it with plasticine to to work your way through the patterns and what the process
is all about. So I hope you enjoy it but here you go; Tod and Owen chatting about Pattern Welding,
him demonstrating, me standing by in wonder really. Thanks i hope you enjoy it. I'll have a
chat about the pattern welding because i'd like to try and explain some of the pattern welding that's
gone into it. Yeah i mean that's interesting because you know how you manipulate plasticine i
think it's a fantastic thing because you just sit there working patterns out don't you by by weaving
yeah some of it in steel and then some of it in plasticine and that gives you your groundwork
before you commit to the steel. So we look at one of the simplest patterns so i've got two colored
plasticines here. In a Viking or Saxon sword that would represent probably phosphoric iron
and wrought iron the materials that would be used in the core. Phosphoric iron reacts to acids in a
different way and is a slightly stiffer material than wrought iron and obviously they'd have
edges that are made of steel, steel encapsulated in wrought iron, very similar to the way that
a Japanese sword is made but more complicated. So i'm going to make up a nine a nine layer bar
just a simple pattern. And this is effectively how you would do it in the forge but with metal?
Yes absolutely, i'm just i'm taking different different steels, or steels and iron,
with different qualities and putting them together and then forge welding them and I'm forge welding
them just by squashing this is plasticine that i did heat up but it's cooled down now,
and it joins in a very similar way to the way that the metal does. We're using pressure and contact,
so you know in the modern context we think of welding you know getting your electric welder out
but of course they were welding in forges so yeah so it's a solid-state fusion it's, hammer welding,
forge welding, fire welding, lots of different words for the same thing and it's a way of
joining material pre-modern electric welding so I've I've forge welded these together now,
put a bit of heat in there with my hands and i'm just going to twist the bar, so if i just twist it
like i say originally this this twisting may have been, i believe it it would have been there as a
proof of of the material quality. to show that the material is good enough to have been twisted but
it also produces quite beautiful patterns. Now the patterns change as you look through the material
so we look at a bar now i've got a diagonal lines going through it it's not particularly interesting
it's also quite messy yeah if i was to cut into this though you'll start to
see what's going on inside and what's going on inside is very complicated.
So on the surface we just have a diagonal striping as i cut through it we'll start
cutting into those overlapped helixes and it changes quite dramatically fantastic
so you start getting crosses if i take another cut you can see how it changes it goes to the middle
so this is a very simple pattern it's just nine layers but you get some quite
wonderful and complex yeah so you've just cut it in a different place and you end up
like here with a completely different pattern set yeah you can see that over there
and if you're looking at old swords obviously part of the job of the
swordsmith is to try and reinterpret what you're seeing on the face of the blade
to make it and reproduce it yourself and this is a traditional quite simple low layer
um sword core. I say simple, i'm saying that now with 25 years of experience behind it.
Well it looks simple in plasticine. Yes absolutely and for me it would be a relatively simple thing
to do in in steel as well. Well you know clearly you've proved that you can do it in plasticine
but that's a very different thing to doing it in steel so show me how you do it. Yeah I will,
it's remarkably similar. I'm starting with a 15 layer billet and this is alternating layers of
bright and dark steel that gets put into the fire and then i'm going to forge weld it all together
Now i'm taking the billet out the fire it's going under a press to be squashed
so that everything inside the billet is touching then i'll put it back in the fire
now the billet has borax on it and that's a flux that protects the outside of the
material from oxidization you'll see that being sprayed off when we hammer it
and it's going under the power hammer and the power hammer is similar to the press in
that it squashes the layers of material together and forges them into one block
and now i'm forging the block of steel down into a section that i
can twist so i'm hammering it and hammering it on the power hammer
until it's the right size for me to be able to take put in a vise and then and then twist
i'm twisting this steel every half turn that i twist
will give me one repetition of pattern one cross in the final pattern
now twisting the steel again just because i want to get a bit more pattern into this piece
i stopped twisting as soon as the material ends up getting too cold or
i think that that i've done enough of the twisting
now i'm grinding the steel the pattern we have on the outside of the bar is not that
interesting it's just diagonal lines so i'm grinding into the bar where some of those
complicated helix overlapping shapes occur so that we can get a pretty final pattern on the bar
i'm etching the bar into ferric chloride which is an acid salt and it's not creating
the pattern etching the steel just shows you the different layers of steel against one another
one of the steels in here is bright and two of the steels in here are dark and so what we're seeing
in the pattern are these different layers as they react with the ferric chloride as they oxidize
so when i'm making a blade i use a power hammer and a press but the process is identical to the
one that would have been used by Viking smiths making sword like like these they they would have
been using hand hammers and possibly had a team of people using sledge hammers but the processes is
pretty much identical i just have a large machine to do it instead of a guy with a sledge hammer