Hi everyone.
Something different.
I will make Mandalorian Beskar steel and there is going to be a give away at the end.
In this episode, I will show you how I made this pretty piece of beskar and if you stick
around till the end it might be yours.
In the Mandalorian, Beskar is the steel from which Mandalorian armor is made.
Curiously, when looking at the clip from the Mandalorian, it looks a lot like
pattern welded steel and it's nice to see that the show took inspiration from the
swordsmithing craft.
To get started, I need to select the steel I want to use.
1095 - a plain high carbon steel and 15n20 - a steel whith high nickel content
won out.
To get the distinctive beskar look for real, a lot of forge welding is required.
This is the process where different types of steel are fused together under pressure
and very high temperatures.
I am cutting six inch long strips and will assemble a 15 layer billet for the initial
forge welding.
In the end, I am looking to get to roughly 150 layers over 5 inches or
30 layers per inch.
This will mean forging and assembling two more billets after the initial fprge welding.
For this to work, I need the keep the material
quite clean as espcially the nickel steel develops very tough scale.
If you have seen my other videos on making knives, swords and spears, you already
know a lot about these processes.
The one thing that is going to be different here is
forging and drawing out on the weld seams so
that the beskar pattern can be created.
This is the way.
To keep the billet together in the heat, I am placing a few weld seams.
As they are on the outside, they will not be visible in the final pattern.
There are no official measurements of a beskar ingot as far as I know but by studying photos,
I think they are roughly 5 by 2.5 in and about a 1/4 in deep.
On the back side, there are two disticintive grooves and the front bears the sigil of the
galactic empire.
Getting the distinctive sigil will require me to hot stamp the beskar ingot at the right
spot and with the right amount of force.
I will do this by hand with a 4 pound forging hammer.
Alright, let's get going on the first forge welding operation.
I will get the billet up to about 2400F Fahrenheit, coat with anyhydrous
borax to help dissolve scale and then weld it gently on the power hammer.
You can see the super hot flux spraying away on the hammer hits.
Tiny holes in my shirt bear witness to how how they are.
There are quite a few tiny scars on my skin as well where larger pieces managed to get
stuck.
Once the billet is welded together, it's time to draw it out to a much longer
bar than can be cut, stacked and forge welded again.
Each of those operations will increase the number of layers in the billet until we get
up into the hundreds.
I am not showing everything here.
You can watch some of my other videos for the details.
You may also notice that the layers are not easily visible.
They will become clearly visible at the very end - during the heat treat process as well
when etching with ferric chloride.
Now.
I am off to another round of forge welding and then drawing out the welded
billet.
Although quite lot, it can also be quite meditative.
You may notice that the power hammer has split dies.
On the one side are flat dies and the side closer to the camera has drawing
dies.
I heavily rely on the drawing dies to quickly elongate the billet.
To be able to cut and stack the billet again, the bar needs to be of even thickness and
width and you can see me do some fine tuning here.
I am tying to keep track of the layer count and this is also an amusing example where
the camera decided to do its own thing.
The point being, I am at about 45 layers at the moment and will cut the billet into
4 pieces to get up to about 170 layers.
You may wonder about my saying about so much when talking about the layer count.
I kept 1095 on the outside and in each stacking operating, there will be two layers of 1095
where the pieces meet and thus no visible increase in layers there.
This is the final forge welding operation.
Just imagine it done at this point.
I am trying to figure out here how much material to cut off the billet in order to
get one beskar ingot.
I am mostly looking at the total volume in cubic inches and determine based on that how
much to cut off.
You will see that in a second.
I decided in needed to cut about 2 and an 1/8 of an inch.
At the moment, the 170 layers are all compressed on the side of the billet and I plan to forge
that out to become the surface of the beskar ingot.
If you want to know how much a beskar ingot should weigh, it's about 600 grams.
As you saw at the beginning, the final result is going to be quite cool.
I will show it to you again at the end.
I plan to give it away to an interested subscriber of my channel.
Stay tuned for that at the end.
The neat thing is that if at some point, you don't want the ingot any more, it's great
pattern welded steel for making knives or short swords from.
So keep that in mind.
I am checking my dimensions here and am close to what I wanted.
Let's measure the weight again and then it's on to the grinder.
This looks nice already.
On the grinder, I am using an aggressive grid and try to true up the dimensions of the beskar
ingot.
I want straight sides, even width and even thickness.
The grinding gets the steel quite hot and I need to frequently cool it down in water.
Before I can take it back to the forge for hot stamping the galactic empire sigil and
hardening the steel to bring out the pattern better, I still need to cut the grooves on
the back.
I am using layout fluid to see where the grooves should be.
I don't have a real milling machine and instead use my mini mill and a ball end
cutter.
Let's see how that goes.
Unfortunately, this was exactly the time where the y axis lead screw for moving the table
decided to bind really badly.
I was still able to finish the grooves though and in the meantime also made replacement
part for the mill - with real bearings this time.
A company on the east coase made this high quality hot stamp for me that I am placing
into my stamping jig.
Let's stamp the galactic empire sigil and heat treat the beskar.
There you have it.
This is the way!
Let's finish it up by polishing and etching it.
Here I need to be careful to not polish too aggressively because the galatic empire sigil
is fairly shallow.
I am using a high grit belt and this should not take all that long.
As a result of all the polishing, the layers visible after heat treating will completely
disappear.
Once I am happy with the polish, it's time to place the steel into my ferric chloride
solution for ten minutes.
And then we are basically done.
The only step remaining is some hand polishing which I will not show here.
If you would like a chance at getting this beautiful piece, take a look in the description
on how the giveaway is going to work.
This is pretty cool and unique.
As always, thanks to everyone on Patreon.
If you like this video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel.
See you next time.