How Can a Novice Tell?

[Twiki]

There are solid Damascus and there are plated/etched Damascus. As far as I can find out they are for show but can be utilized to some extent.

Personally I don't care for them.

 

[Wowbagger]

they are for show

I would have to agree with you although I think it is a shame. In theory "THE BIG DEAL" about all that layering and laminating and endless folding and hammering and . . .

well you get the idea
is to make a blade that is relatively thin, flexible and yet can survive the mighty blows of war.
Hard stuff for the cutting ability and layers of milder ductile steel to prevent breakage.
and to some degree tactile feed back when establishing a bevel / sharpening.

but
what we get are these bloody axed thick things that are not good for much. Way too thick and not flexible so all the layers are pointless other than they look good. Some look REALLY good IMO.

Then there is the whole :
1. The damascus should go through and through all the way to the edge to get the benefit of the carbide or teeth what have you

and on the other hand

2. Samurai swords, one of if not THEE pinnacle of hand held cutting tools, in which the layers DO NOT go all the way to the edge and the layers are mostly two laminations one on each side of the blade for the above mentioned insurance against breakage.

and maybe the really old back in the day reason was the edge steel was precious and expensive and so the laminations on the sides saved bucks.

 

[NJBillK]

2. Samurai swords, one of if not THEE pinnacle of hand held cutting tools, in which the layers DO NOT go all the way to the edge and the layers are mostly two laminations one on each side of the blade for the above mentioned insurance against breakage.

and maybe the really old back in the day reason was the edge steel was precious and expensive and so the laminations on the sides saved bucks.

There are quite a few ways and patterns that were followed, in regards to how the steels were laid upon and welded together. Often, these types of patterns were individualized to the schools that made them.
Some of the higher end swords had 3 types of steels used, a low, medium and high carbon sections, with 8-16+ folds, resulting in an incredible amount of layers.

The simple 2 low carbon layers and a high carbon core was the second lowest form only sword made, second only to the single alloyed high carbon version.
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The blooms used for the swords are only made in small batches today by Hitachi and one other company (iirc) and their $ value for the blooms are often higher than many modern alloy billets and blooms.

 

[sstoots]

So, cut a bunch of card board boxes and see how the edge handles it? Is the test passed if the knife retains most all of its edge and sharpness? I reckon the next step is to see how the blade responds to sharpening?

 

[bdmicarta]

So, cut a bunch of card board boxes and see how the edge handles it? Is the test passed if the knife retains most all of its edge and sharpness? I reckon the next step is to see how the blade responds to sharpening?

I wondered how to interpret the results of my informal test. I've seen tests where people did cutting and got a range of results, so there is a lot of uncertainty in performance of known materials. I figured a good steel with mediocre heat treat would cut a moderate amount, but a mediocre steel with good heat treat might perform the same way. But I then figured that if I wanted to use the knife, the exact material and heat treat didn't matter, the actual performance was what I was interested in and the cutting test provides evidence of that fairly directly.

So in my case it wasn't a pure pass/fail. In a sense my blade did pass because it had reasonable cutting performance. If it had dulled immediately then that would have been a fail proving that it had poor materials and heat treat.