Damascus success and fail at the same time?

[leachknives]

Hey there everyone. I've been busy since the last time I was on here so here goes.
First off, I was successful at forge welding my first Damascus billet, which was 5 layers. I then proceeded to draw it out and cut and re-stack 5 times, bringing it to 160 layers. It seemed to be going pretty well until the fourth time I re-stacked it, which I don't think it welded very well about half way up it. Same thing happened the fifth time as well.

In these 2 pics you can see the end of one of the halves that I polished then used my propane torch to bring out the color in order to see the lines.

In these 2 I had half assed ground them flat, rough ground the edge bevels, broke the blade off of the handle that I had welded onto it for forging, and lastly etched it so I could see all of the lines.
So, the way I see it, I was successful at forge welding a billet and re-stacking several times, and there really wasn't any inclusions that I could see, but unsuccessful because parts of it de-laminated, or didn't even weld at all.
Now for the questions. did I forge too cold at some point? Or did I not get it to weld a few times? Do you guys that have been making pattern welded blades still have this problem sometimes? Overall, what do you think about my first semi-success? I need some honest opinions and some suggestions here from anyone that is willing.
Thanks for looking,
Dave

 

[A C Richards]

Did you grind the faces clean between layers?? If you did it was a heat problem, or possibly a hammer problem. If you hit too hard or work too cold it could delam. If you did not grind clean it could be an inclusion that prevented the weld. Also if there was a little pocket from a hammer mark or uneven forging you could have caught a bit of flux that could not squeeze out. There are too many possibilities to really give you an actual cause but those are a few.