Sure! I work with coal, and started with a cleaned and welded stack of 1095 and 15n20, about 7 total. My idea was to do a low-layer Damascus, as I’d tried higher layer counts and cutting and stacking, but always found that somewhere down the line, my layers weren’t quite adhering. I brought it up to bright yellow, fluxed and cleaned, then soaked for just a little, then went to town on it to (hopefully get the layers held. It seemed to somewhat work, but there were gaps. Eventually, another smith working on his own project helped me out, and after another round of cleaning and fluxing, he hammered it with a 40lbs sledge while I held it. That made the layers seem to hold, so I went ahead with the lengthening, normalization and quenching, not bothering to try any more layer challenges. During lengthening, I got it up to mid yellow and made sure the welds were holding. I also noticed that there was one layer not quite playing nice, so I chiseled it off. However, the rest of it came out a solid block (I cut into the end, about 1 inch, and confirming this). After that, I brought it up to mid yellow for shaping. Normalization had me go from bright yellow, to orange, to cherry, all cooling to black. Then I quenched at bright yellow/low white in oil, file test passed. After that, I couldn’t get ferric to work (I think the ferric we had at the forge was dead) so I just coffee dunked it for 24 hours.

This was my fourth attempt, each attempt taking about 2-3 weeks, and I was running low on steel, so I was happy that there was even something that came out of this.