True Damascus Steel is renowned for its flexibility, strength and sharpness, and above all, it’s beautiful patterns. Modern blacksmiths use pattern welding to mimic true damascus, but is a far cry from the original.

The art of making true damascus has been lost for generations due to the secrecy surrounding each smith’s techniques and tricks of the trade dying off for good sometime around 1850. Many modern attempts have been made to recreate and even reverse engineer true wootz damascus steel to no avail, until legendary knife maker Al Pendray teamed up with Professor JD Verhoeven. This video on the Mike Loades channel goes through the process, and discusses how certain trace elements were needed, and narrowed a possibly source of the iron ore from Jordan, although India is historically more famous for wootz steel.

While the process is not simple, nothing worth doing well is.