Japanese knife construction

jmforge

jmforge

Well-Known Member
What is they type of Japanese knife construction called where you split a pice of low carbon steel or other cladding material and make a "taco"
for lack of a better way of describing it and then insert and forge weld a high carbon core? I am talking about a blade where the spine is cladding material as opposed to the high carbon core being exposed like with more typical San Mai? I saw Murray Carter do that with a nakiri in a video from about 8 or 9 years back.
 
Taz575 said:
Warikomi is what they call it when the cladding doesn't expose the core steel on the spine.
Click to expand...
That's it!!! Now the next thing that I have to figure out is how the Japanese smiths get the cladding to "roll over" a little bit to the hard side in Kasumi knives. One video I saw seemed to show the smith tapering the hagane piece top to bottom and putting the smaller end at the heel side. Would that allow you to mash it all together and have exposed sift steel at the spine once you leveled everything out?
 
Is the mild steel rolled into a taco shape or do you just almost split a thick enough bar deep enough v-notch and shape the tool steel into a wedge that you weld into it, making effectively the same thing as the taco when the blade is forged from there?

When i get to my computer tomorrow I'll try to remember to post a video link of a Japanese smith who had the process down
 
Those guys have to knock out a lot of blades! Were they using salt for HT?
 
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