First thing I'm curious about is how long you etched it in Ferric (i.e. "Radio Shack etchant")? In my first attempts at etching damascus, I was very tentative... doing ten second dips at first... then full minute dips... then three minute dips. What I ended up with looked etched, but it was very superficial. Only when I allowed the piece to sit in the Ferric for an hour did I get the textured result I wanted.
Second question I have is do you have any scrap pieces from the billet that you cut away? If you retained those you can use them for etch testing and not risk any futher testing on the blade itself until you know the results. I recently did this and left sample pieces in seperate etch vials (pill vials filled with Ferric) for 1 hour, 4 hours and overnight. The results determined how I wanted to do the actual etch on the real blade.
The last thing is the metal types, and this is where I'm totally ignorant. My assumption is that different steels etch in different ways (and at different speeds, possibly with different etchants). So far the only combination I've tried is 1084/15N20, and ferric works fine on that. My next project will be done on 1075/15N20, and because that is a different steel type I'll do the same sort of three vial testing on that to make sure I know what I'm doing before I etch the real blade. But if someone could simply tell us what to expect when etching different steels, that would also be useful in setting our expectations.
What you're working with includes some hypereutectoid steels, and I would expect they react differently... but just how differently I wouldn't know.
- Greg
