Can I make Titanium Damascus?

tl;dr - Yes, he can, but it's expensive and involves a whole lot of oxidation.

Damascus steel has a noteworthy pattern that is really what Alec is trying to reproduce with the titanium shown in these videos. Here he starts with alternating grades of titanium stacked then forge welds them together.

The steps required to then anneal and machine the titanium billet that he produces are labor-intensive to say the least.

But he does get some cool rings out of the process.

Parts 2 and 3 of the series are after the jump.

Anodizing Titanium - How To Anodize Titanium With 9V Batteries Cheap And Easy - Full Tutorial (2020)

That looks so simple...now I just need to find a source of titanium handy so we can do that in lab.

And I'm a little afraid of the rust remover because I read an article about hydrofluoric acid's dangers a while back.

But that really does look like something I could achieve.

I wonder what colors you can get...

Oh, thanks.

Facinating metal rings change multiple colours.

Edit: I had hunted down a YouTube upload of the Reddit video I'm about to describe, but that upload disappeared before this post even appeared, so I'm just linking to the Reddit original. I do warn you that the title of the subreddit contains a nsfw word. It's titled blackmagicf***ery. You have been warned. The above video is less thrilling and contains some pretty annoying music though it does show the same concept of titanium anodization.

I originally found it on one of Reddit's unfortunately-named subreddits. That link is here, but I'll avoid embedding from the Reddit source so the inappropriate subreddit title won't show up here. You have been warned.

It is exactly the same video, however the reddit version is in slightly higher resolution.

Not much to say here other than that this is a bit of a teaser for a video I'm posting later this week that explains how anodizing works...

...and the new fad deadly among teenagers that you need to know.

Titanium - The Metal That Made The SR-71 Possible

 Hey there, Brian. Good to hear you again.

I recognize those material selection diagrams at 1:35. I've posted about similar diagrams before.

This video does a great job exploring the tradeoffs among strength, weight, cost, and properties in choosing a material. In this case, it's mostly about the tradeoffs guiding when we do - and don't - use titanium.

It also covers some of the concepts of chemical and electrolytic reduction around 5:00 - and states that we don't use either of the traditional processes to purify titanium. It's amazing that anybody ever figured out some of the more complicated metals processing...um...processes. They're so remarkably complicated.

We also get an application of accidental galvanic corrosion at 8:30 where the cadmium-plated tools were leaving trace amount of cadmium on the titanium.

Titanium really sounds like a pain in the tuchus to work with.