Hand forged San-Mai / Go-Mai billet. 80crv2 (1080+) carbon steel core with 420 stainless clad and nickel. 3x60x360mm.

These billets are intended to be ground to shape, with no need to forge. Perfect for stock removal makers. I like to keep the forge scale on the flats but with care to grind symmetrically, it can be removed. These billets come as forged, and slightly oversize, you will need to grind the edge of the billet back to good material.

All our billets are forged in a zero-atmosphere environment to ensure perfect welds. We pride ourselves in well-centred cores, even patterning, and excellent quality steel. You may find these will warp lass in heat treat than plain steel stock.

Once ground and etched, the cutting edge will be black followed by a bright nickel line and then a beautiful carbon migration pattern into the lighter colour stainless. As you can see from the sample pictures, the look can be changed with different polishing and etching processes. please take a look at the ‘using our billets’ page for more info and feel free to email if you have any questions.

These billets have been annealed and can be drilled with decent hss drills although we’d recommend carbide-tipped drills.

Heat treat info for 80crv2 core billets:

Normalise once by heating to 880c and let cool to room temp in air, quench at 850c after a 5-10 minute hold at temp in parks 50 equivalent oil. Temper for 2 x 2-hour cycles at 200c for approximately 61 hrc.

This steel has good toughness and should be durable even at this hardness. Please note these instructions are just guidelines. With practice, you could get decent results with a torch/forge as this is a fairly forgiving steel to heat treat but for best results, a heat treat oven is useful.