Who here has been brave enough to give this a shot? I've got a buddy with a machine shop (which means almost unlimited small ball bearings in the scrap bin) and giant press so I thought I'd take a stab at making canister Damascus. I was going to buy some powdered steel from a couple of online suppliers but with the weak dollar and the price of shipping I was looking for alternatives. Then I came across someone talking about using steel shot blasting abrasive in place of the "powdered" steel. Of course, Princess Auto had a 50lb bag of just the stuff but I'm nervous about buying a whole sack of it only to have it not work properly (Like I need 49 lbs of useless blasting shot if this doesn't work out). The shot they have comes in 230 grit which should be between .5 and .6mm which seems like it should work (I know, assumption is the mother of all #### ups). As for composition, it is (on the face of it) a decent steel C 0.85 - 1.20% Mn 0.60 - 1.20% Si 0.50 - 1.20% S < 0.05% P < 0.05%. Best of all it works out to about $1.85/lb where the 1080 from K&G is $4.90 as is 10-95 from HiTemp and that's before shipping. Anyone ever tried to get this stuff to weld into a decent billet? Any experience at all?
Steel shot has been wrecking welds the last week on my current job, seems like any shot residue trapped in a crevice also has porosity. I can see ball bearings working but if the carbon content is in the high range of 1.2% then you could run into problems. One idea may be to press the shot into a stainless steel layer this way you are doing something similar to welding cast iron with a nickel rod. No promises that it will work but an interesting idea.
