I know it’s been forever since I posted any updates here, but then again, it’s been forever since I’ve been in the shop and I’ve been very busy with a new job. My new job is with an amazing company that you’ve likely never heard of called Battelle. They are a non-profit Science and technology Research and Innovation company and I am working in their newly created Cyber Security group. Lots of exciting things going on that will be keeping me busy, but I hope to find some time to get into the shop as well as write some more content for this site.

As it turns out, but CEO of my new company is Dr. Jeffrey Wadsworth who has authored several papers and articles over the years on the history and properties of Damascus steel. Needless to say I’ve been reading his papers recently and hope to incorporate some of what I’m learning into the history section of this site as I put it together.

In the shop, I’m working on a big commission that has me doing some things I’ve never done before. My time in the shop today included working the kinks out of my process for creating a multi-bar serpent core for a sword using the method reverse-engineered by Jeff Pringle that he shared in this thread at Don Fogg’s Forum. Below you can see a section of the test bar I used to work out the required twisting. This is going to take a little time on 4 core bars…