Hello, 

I'm looking for input on something. Recently I forged a couple stainless clad laminate billets. I haven't done many of these, maybe a dozen +, but have had good results after a couple initial failures to weld.

These particular billets are 416 stainless cladding, pure nickel, and 52100 core. This is the first time I've incorporated nickel into a stainless clad billet.

Both billets went fine, but upon finishing the blades and going to the ferric etch, I began seeing an interesting phenomenon on one of the blades. It appears as some light, "wiskery" deposits of nickel on the core steel. This only showed up when put in the etch, and dissapeared from sight when re-sanded with the 1500 grit paper. Back in the etch, and it appeared again. At first I thought maybe I wasn't cleaning frequently enough, but I don't think that was it. I was etching both blades at a time, suspended on the same rod, and thought maybe some sort of electrolysis was taking place. I re-finish-ground the blade, which did not fix it.

I decided the most likely reason was I had overheated the billet somewhat and the core steel began opening up (maybe stating to melt at the grain boundaries..?!?) to accept or bond with the nickel beyond a regular forge weld. Additionally, the nickel layer boundary is not crisp, which also seems to indicate overheating.

Whatever the case, I decided to discard the blade and do some heavy testing to destruction to see how the steel held up. I was pleasantly suprised, and did not notice any issues with the steel at all. I finished up by snapping the blade twice, and even though it had been tempered of course, I got a pretty good idea of the grain size and it looked good. (on the 52100; the 416 looked a lot worse actually).

I've included photos of the snapped blade, the nickel deposits, and the knife that turned out properly.

I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced or seen something like this?

Thanks,

Elijah