The villain is defeated, our hero stands above him with the sword that was made by masters folded a thousand times and now the testament to the greatness of its masters work slices through the air, and through flesh, and back through air.....My eyes as a young boy could not be any wider with the prospect of holding such a perfect weapon, and dream of such things in my geeked out years of D&D I did. I will never forget watching the steps of a Japanese sword maker fold the metal and pound out a perfect sword, the blade Bill showed me of maiden hair and circular design in Damascus steel, nor the first time I saw mokume in my grandfathers display cabinet of metals he had created. This is process is harder than it seems and requires a large investment of time as well as the need to understand all metals and their temper coupled with an ability to see layers of color that remain hidden in a solid block until the last moment.
6 years I melted, and pounded, and cried with frustration as the lines of metal were not perfectly defined but melted together with blurry lines, until one day I made a ring for a friend who actually in the end did not buy it, but settled on a plain platinum band instead. This was the first piece I had made that was perfect, and also in a metal combination that was viewed as impossible by many masters to do. This was the first day I felt the metal was actually talking to me, the day I made that ring.
I believe the best way to think of metal is like snow, dense compact snow almost to the point of ice, only bendable. Each plate of metal has a personality of its' own, for example platinum doesn't expand as much when heated and gold can sometimes tear itself apart when fused to platinum because it expands twice as much. Some metal should cool slowly to be soft to work, while others need to be dropped in water to cool quickly for the tensile strength to be reduced. It is these differences in metal temperament that can produce problems when they are combined together, and what makes making mokume gane sometime so difficult when using metal of different .
Take those layers of different snow and pack them together making sure there is a uniform stacking, compact them between two steel plates, and place them in the oven. Find the lowest melting point of the metals being used and stay about 25% under the lowest temperature. After the first firing compress the metals further, with a hammer hot forging the thickness of the billet reduced by 50%. Then the fun part, making the pattern. Punch, file, grind and hammer the stack, expose the layers and contort them into strata that fits the mood and voila! Layered metal combined together with a perfect bond, and great organic effect of color and patterns.
