Guy at the swap meet in Hays told me my forge weld looked like a cow patty, and he was right

Elliot Garcia · 2026-09-23T21:05:21.181006+00:00

So I drove out to the swap meet in Hays two Saturdays back, mostly hunting for tongs and maybe a decent hammer head. I had this chain Damascus billet I'd been working on for like three weeks, and I brought a cut-off chunk to show this old guy named Merle who sets up by the north gate selling farrier tools. Anyway he looks at the etch on my billet, squints, and goes "son, that weld took about as good as a cow patty in July." I wanted to argue but then I flipped it over in the sun and saw the cold shut running right down the middle, clear as anything, about two inches long. Three weeks of folding and fluxing and I never once checked the other side of the billet before I got excited about the pattern. He didn't even charge me for the lesson, just handed me a piece of 1080 and told me to stop rushing the heats. I've made six billets since then and every single one gets cut and checked on both faces before it goes anywhere near the grinder now. Any of you run into cold shuts you swore up and down weren't there until somebody called you out?

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Guy at the swap meet in Hays told me my forge weld looked like a cow patty, and he was right | Blacksmiths - Opinions Matter