Received my custom damascus knife from New Zealand the other day, what a marvellous blade! Built by Max Norrell in Christchurch, as a favour for taking him and his son out on a couple of fishing and hunting trips when he visited the Top End of Australia a while back. His son, a geomatic engineer, worked with me for 2 years during his posting in Darwin.

Max and his partner are in the process of setting up a new power hammer, so should be able to make a few more in the future, but they're not rushing in to it just yet.

This example has been triple thermal pulsed before hardening to refine the grain structure, then hardened and single tempered to specifications of the two steels which are very suited to each other. The resulting scale of hardness is usually Rockwell 57-59 but this blade tested Rockwell 61, the hardest that can be obtained with these two steels.

As you can imagine, I'm very pleased!