It’s pretty special to be able to make this happen after all these years of wanting to try it. I’ve got huge respect for the inventors of the process and the time and effort they put into developing it and patenting it 20 years ago. I’m very excited to see what we can do with Titanium now that we can forge weld it! Maybe I’ll try a lower temperature next time though 😅😂🔥 You can check out the bonus shop improvement video here by the way! www.asteeleblock.com/bonus
In general, the only thing patents protect against, is commercial sale (in the country the patent was filed/claimed). Education is usually an allowed use, which this 100% would count as. Also, in order to get sued, you usually need to be risking cutting into their profits. Which means you'd need to producing a HUGE amount of titanium Damascus. Just showing how it's made doesn't matter. A patent is basically a recipe after all. And it's almost always a cease and desist first. Also suing a youtuber is a bad look because of audience size. 1 bad video will make a lot more headache for them, than you making a piece of titanium damascus. To be clear, not a lawyer, but this has been the advice I've always been given by R&D professionals who bump into overlapping patents all the time. All that to say, great video, thrilled it worked! Edit: Used less firm language, as lawyers can sue for any reason. Doesn't mean they'd win, and they'll usually burn too much money suing you for it to be worth what they'll get back, so they don't. Also in academia, you use patented material all the time, regardless of the patent holder's wishes. Only time lawyers get involved is when whatever you made leaves the lab and enters the commercial market.
If the steel jacket did bond with the titanium you could make a beautiful and sturdy knife. Titanium doesn't have great edge retention in my experience so being able to add a high carbon/tool stool edge would go a long way to helping with that.
Alas it was mild steel. But it would probably be easier to forge tool steel onto that surface than the titanium, seeing as our boy Alec has more experience with that.
I might be wrong but even if something is patented, I think you can still recreate something you just can't sell it. Like think of the vice-grips series from a couple years back, I'm sure there's a patent on that design but there was no reason not to recreate it
@@scottsolar5884 yes the titanium patent ran out in 2023, it was brought up in the discord when the cast iron chips canister video released and after some digging and discussion about the educational use laws of it realised it was expired
Saying that heat is everything needed to „colour“ the titanium with oxides, couldn‘t you use the Paragon heat treating oven to aim for very specific patterns/ colours? This could result in some insane builds :o
For Flow rates, in medicine. 2-5LPM is low flow or Normal. 6-10 is a medium flow, and anything above 10LPM is High flow, but when high flow is indicated we usually run up to 15LPM. Just a thought and maybe help on your flow rate decisions.
@@AlecSteele Make a preheat chamber for the gas so the heat on the inside is more even. You could also try plating the titanium with some other metal so it doesn't oxidise without the inert gas, or do it in vacuum. Use just two pieces to test, you can fold them later.
I was gonna say the vague language was a bit suspicious (since the point of patents is to give all the details in exchange for legal protection from competition for a certain period), but that makes it seem more legit.
Electricity is the best way to color titanium, different voltages yield different colors. With a bench top power supply u can fine tune the exact color u want with the twist of a knob
while anodizing titanium is the best for getting specific colours, using heat allows for some nice gradients in the colouring, which is relatively hard using electricity.
In my experience you can get gradients by using low amperage. My grade 2 and 5 samples behave slightly differently under the same voltage and electrolyte concentration settings.
This is the reason I’m subscribed: i live for the experimental stuff. After seeing those lines, a kris dagger made if titanium damascus would be INCREDIBLE.
100%! I love the experimental stuff. I think I first subscribed when Alec did the copper Damascus. Megumi something if memory serves. A quick Wikipedia and I think it was Mokume-gane. I wasn't so far away.
It's one of the noble gasses on the periodic table, for future reference to other gases that are also inert. But I should clarify that any gas can be compressed within a sealed chamber, and that can still vent explosively.
This is surreal - I was literally telling my friend about timascus last night(I made his wedding ring) and now you upload this. So cool. Can't wait to see you do more videos on this. Titanium is one of my favourite materials to work with, so I'm really keen to see what you'll do with it!
It's so great seeing Alec giddy and excited for a whole new realm of possibilities. I can see it now, "sharpest damascus titanium katana in the world" getting like 50M views lmao
Still can't believe the process of doing this was something you could patent. We're going to do layered Damascus, but do so in a canister Damascus fashion... and for good measure we're going to weld together our metals in a way no one would every thing... but using inert gases to weld. Patent Examiner: Looks good to me >STAMP
a patent can be granted for a novel workflow or process. Forging damascus titanium in this way is (or was, at the time of the patent being granted) a novel workflow/process, even if the individual steps of the process are not new or unique. Thus, a patent was granted.
Patents often don't include exact details or variations used in production, to make it harder to replicate, so things like holes/positions shown could well be non-optimal
I'm not a patent lawyer, but I presumed you were allowed to produce something based upon an active patent, so long as you don't engage in commercial activity by selling it or distributing it. For instance, you should, in theory, be able to make something that is fully patent protected, show the process to people (since it's freely available on the patent database anyway), but you cannot sell or distribute the thing you've created. I could be totally wrong, and I guess there's a whole lot of nuance involved, so yeah. If there are any patent lawyers on here, I'd love to be corrected! Thanks for the vid Alec. 👊
Now this is something I'm hyped for. If Alec can make something you can actualy use out of titanium damascus and give it those amazing colors... man I REALLY want to see that happen.
I think titanium melts at like 1600-1700 which explains the expensive pudding cup. It melts a lot lower than what you harden most steels though. These metals are wild to do any work with. I don't know how normal it is but when I've seen it treated it usually comes out like 30-40 rc
This is very cool. The idea of cutting the billet into slices then cutting those slices into triangles or some shape then arranging them into unique patterns is really interesting. Also I'm sure you've seen those Counterstrike knives that have this coloration. Neat!
I would try to look up the cfh for Tig welding titanium and bring that up by a couple for the purge, also forgot to mention this on the magnesium video but Tig welding magnesium is possible, it's normally done as an AC process though
Alec we love watching your videos because of who you are, you don't have to make videos that are hard to make and time consuming for you. The more of you the better the video
The result does look really cool. I look forward to you making some big project out of some pretty-colored titanium damascus (maybe a big ol' ceremonial sword?).
stack the sheets together in a larger 8 inch long 4 inch wide 3/8 inch thick block shape, cut out some of the sheets on the outer end so that their are holes in them that create a jagged wood grain receptacle for the adjacent sheets to fill... optimally of the 3/8 inch thick box, 3 sheets inside of it. 1/8" outer case and 1/16" inner sheets the middle one being having a jagged simulated wood grain hole that the outer two forge into "use water jet cutter to make pre-planned out filler bits, thus leaving only one 1/16 size sheet forging... excessive twisting and da da da methods, use cut water jet to cut out patterns out of each kind of metal (less wasted material)"
Probably should build a poly shield for the press. Just in case it wants to shoot back at you next time. It'll only get your arms instead of your whole body.
There is a book that has recipes for making Damascus out of many different materials. It includes which gas to use, temperatures, alloys, etc. Mokume Gane by Ian Ferguson - published in 2002, but you can still find it today.
Doing Schlenk chemistry in a forge... I guess it is the obvious answer to titanium burning white hot if you heat it in air, but I'm amazed nonetheless.
I’ve been waiting since I saw ur can I forge titanium vid only you could make this happen and thank you as ur one of the reason I started blacksmithing and knife making
You could potentially use that melting as part of the process to get even crazier patterns than otherwise possible. Let it partially melt mid-forging, and then let the soft, hot metal ooze around as you apply the hammer pressure.
if you put the abrasive disc in a chop saw. you could cut that brick into a bunch of 3mm thick slices. could make some sweet key chains, pendants or other cool things!
It's funny how the reaction to titanium shavings catching fire depends on the profession: Metalworkers take it as a huge danger, pyrotechnics and they are the safest thing you can let even a baby hold. Well, not exactly, the cold spark powder is titanium, zirconium and titanium dioxide, but basicly it produces extremely bright spray of burning titanium that cannot even discolor paper with its heat.
The coloring of the oxidation layers at least at the beginning is related to how thick it is. You can actually tell the thickness of a very thin layer like that by the color. of course once it becomes thicker the actual properties the oxide has take over.
Steel sparks : Yellow to orange. Titanium sparks : Blinding white with possibly a hint of light blue. Slightly reduce the temperature. About 40°F lower should be good.
Well this is a brand new fantastic venture. Well rewind the clock 10 years and restart every project in titanium Damascus. To the next 10 years of exciting projects!!
This is VERY promising! How about a titanium damascus scimitar? Or one of the mythological weapons that were used by the Greek gods to subdue the Titans?
I want to see a knife with a titanium core and tool steel edges! Edit: better yet , titanium Damascus core with a hard steel Damascus strip making the edge!
For your small parts storage you could use a 3d printer to make dividers or little boxes that fit in those drawers. Much less expensive than buying those storage bins for their drawers. Then you could use the printer to make objects for molds?
The point of the gas is to disperse O2 and prevent oxidisation, so long as you have it on far a while to flush out the O2, you just need to have a positive pressure in the billet and no more will get in. Its like any O2 will be trying to swim up stream
I have an idea for a video, that you may fancy: try to reduce forge scale will aluminum (using thermite reaction), to get steel and make something out of it. All you need is scale (iron oxide) ground down to a powder, aluminum powder and a source of carbon (charcoal powder) to make the ingot steel not iron. Could be cool. You could make one out of plain carbon steel and another with added nickel, and make damascus out of the two! Veritasium has a cool video on the thermite reaction you could look up as a start.
For brazing copper while purging the inside of oxygen we use nitrogen at less than 1 psi. In refrigeration it’s important to not have scale inside the copper.
You gotta make something out of it now, the edc world has been using it for pocket knife clips, thumb studs ,pens ,etc for a long time now. Id love to see what you could make
