Damascus Chef Knives Revealed
Posted By admin on December 17, 2011
Damascus Chef Knives Revealed
Damascus chef knives is a common name given today to all sorts of knives that have a variegated surface on the blade.
This means that there are folds and layers of carbon steel showing on the blade.
There are several ways in which this is possible.
The real way is when a metal craftsman takes a block of steel and ads different elements to it such as carbon, vanadium, cobalt and more. Then the metal is heated in a forge and pounded on until it is flattened.
After it is flattened, a cut is made in the middle, not all the way, and the metal is folded on itself like a newspaper. The next step is to pound the metal compound again until it is flat and fold it again and again until several layers of metal form.
The early and most powerful Samurai swords had up to 800 layers of metal and even up to 1600 layers of metal.
But there is a catch:
Not all knives with Damascus blades are of good quality.
The metal compound which forms the blade is extremely important.
Almost any metal can be folded, but not all folded metals will provide good quality blades.
The compounds, the quantity and mixture of elements in the metal is extremely important to the quality of the blade.
Damascus knives got their name from the origin. The first Damascus knives were forged in Syria, Afghanistan and the middle east region of the world. That was around the 8th century AD, and then about 500 years later the knowledge reached the far east – Japan.
The best quality Damascus blades have been and probably always will be made in Japan.
For centuries, the Japanese metallurgists have created and refined the quality of the metals and knife blades to a degree that their blades, even the old ones are the best knives created ever.
This knowledge has been running in families in Japan passed from father to son in secrecy and long years of training.
Today there are only a few people in the whole world that actually know the real compounds used to create the real original Damascus blades.
These days pretty much every one that creates folded steel calls it a Damascus blade.
So look around and find out what the base material for the blade is before you purchase your chef knife.
The formation is important, but the metal compound is as important as the knife itself.
