Fisk American Bowie project - 1 layer for every US citizen

[Buddy Thomason]

It's big, and bold to boot. Beautifully executed by Jerry. Read below how he built the blade billet and what the knife is all about. Pretty impressive, IMHO.



"The American Bowie?.A 13 inch blade, one for each of the colonies America started out with. The client wanted a layer for each man, woman and child according to the American census talley.

The American Bowie has 318, 477.740 layers of steels. The steels consist of steels from
Building #2 of the World Trade Center
The bombing of Pearl Harbor
USS Cole, [outer hull]
Statue of Liberty
Golden Gate Bridge
Wrought iron wheel from Civil war cannon
Rail Road date nails from early 20 century [1908 and 1916]
A spike from were Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil so he could play the blues music [were the Southern crosses the Dawg]
Spring holder from a Model T Ford
50 caliber sniper barrel
Steel from Aldo
A saw blade from the pulp wood saw that my father made his living with as a young man
A wrench used by my wife?s father that he made his living with as a young man

There is an etching of George Washington tying his horse up to the tree this wood came from. He tied his horse to this walnut tree when he checked on his distillery. He made both rye whiskey and a peach Brandy. The knife comes with a bottle of George Washington recipe rye whiskey.

It took me off and on two years to get it welded up. When I started the layer count was just a bit over the actual census number for USA. During that time we now have more people, I guess I should have made a add on spacer area. 
One of the problems that I faced was of course seeing a pattern, so to overcome that I inserted 3 of pieces of 15n20 about 5 welds from the tail end of the welding process. BUT, when I did a flash etch after grinding I found that I just had a watering of steel, not a defined pattern. Given the amount of welds and the loss of steel from scaling during these many welds I ended up with just enough steel to make the 13 inch bowie blade.
So, I welded up a smaller billet but with the same layer count and welded a 208 count piece of Damascus on each side for the outer skins and used the second billet as a core, hence the wide band which is the one with the actual high layer count and the fact that you can see a pattern.
The client will also receive the bad blade. No flaws, just a light watering of the pattern.
Jerry"

Jerry always asks me to do a version of the knife images on a plain white background. Publishers and editors like it - saves them time and work extracting the knife from the fancy background so it can be placed in their particular layout.