Raindrop starts the same way as our Ladder Damascus — alternating 1084 and 15N20, forge-welded and folded to roughly 200 layers — but the motif comes from a different mechanical step. Once the billet is drawn flat, we drive a round drift bar straight down into the face at a grid of points, which locally pushes the layers into a cone shape beneath each strike point rather than cutting them like the ladder’s grooves do.
Forging the billet flat again afterward flattens the visible face while leaving those buried cones intact underneath, and it’s the cross-section of those cones that etches out as the circular raindrop rings. Drift spacing and strike depth both have to stay consistent across the whole billet, or the rings come out unevenly sized — a mistake that’s much harder to hide after etching than before it.
