A while back, I saw Jim Crowell do a demo of what he named "the hillbilly hamon" with an O/A torch on 5160. It's my understanding, however, that traditional clay hamons on that steel are unlikely to be successful (due to the manganese content).

Check out the topic of the month for November 2011. There's some really great info in there!

To making clay hamon, you need the lower hardenability steels you can get. Mn and Cr are the alloy elements more critical, but Si and Mo also increases significantly the hardenability. In my poor experience, the more critical element is manganese, somewhat over 0.6 of Mn doesn't work well. Also over 1% of Cr is bad. In both cases it may result in a hamon, but a poor quality one.

Here in Europe, the best results I have obtained were with Hitachi White Paper, c105 (like w1), c145sc, Uddeholm uhb20 (like 1095), and Bohler k990.

alerts got buried in my mailbox however i have learned more about Hamons since then. you can get use clay to get a hamon in deep hardening steel, however you do not get as strong of a hamon as in w2 or 10xx series steels and you have to polish it to a high degree and then etch it. even then the hamon is weak.