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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

Yes, you are correct. We know that what is marketed as damascus steel today is not at all the same.

"Damascus steel" today is mostly made for visual effect and the name is used for marketing purposes. I personally think this is ok, since there is no competition with actual damascus steel.

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The visual/marketing focus on so-called "Damascus" steel is almost ridiculous:

I own a "Damascus" knife. Like many well-designed modern knives, it uses a core of hard steel in the middle (VG-10 in my case) clad between two layers of soft steel. This is a very good design, enabling one to always have a hard steel for the cutting edge while also having the durability of soft steel from the bulk of the knife matter.

Now a moment's thought shows that the "Damascus" part - which is on the outer cladding layers - has absolutely nothing to do with the cutting edge, and is therefore entirely superfluous from a functionality standpoint :)

Odd. My son's steel ends up with 100-200 layers of alternating steel. Not 3?

AFAICT the Damascus steel in this example is the decorative soft steel on the outside with a thin piece of brittle hardened steel on the inside to keep the edge sharp

Having attended University of Forged in Fire for many years, I am now an overconfident internet authority on knife making. What you are referring to is call "san mai", not Damascus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_mai

I think you're both right - yes, the harder-steel-in-the-middle is what gets called 'san mai' (though smiths all over the world have forge-welded harder steel to softer iron for tools and in knives for a long time), and the parent was describing a knife with decorative 'damascus' patterns on the outer layers of a harder steel center. I have a similar Shun [1] I got from Williams-Sonoma years ago, which slices onions as usual, but looks good doing it.

1: https://shun.kaiusa.com/

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