If you want it reanodized I can hook you up with whatever color clip you want, free of charge.

Damascus is not a coating. You need Damascus steel to etch it's structure pattern.

gotcha

[QUOTE]Originally posted by the ob:
...The blue color was not necessarily a selling point for me anyway...QUOTE]
Me, neither. But I did think the black/blue color scheme of the morpho butterfly species for this knife was pretty clever. And blue is possibly the best-looking anodized color on Ti

A lot of damascus is pattern welded with two different steels, with one usually higher in nickel content. Folding and twisting during the forging process creates the patterns, and acid etching gives the different layers contrast.

It's somewhat similar to mokume gane.

I didn't mean to suggest that I thought damascus was a coating.. I understand it's two different steels pounded together and folded over each other though I thought the difference was a higher chromium % rather than nickel. Anyway, I assumed one had a higher resistance to an acid wash, but for some reason I was under the impression that they used electric current to agitate as well. I learn something new every day

Oh, there are probably dozens of different manufacturing techniques and ingredients to making what it called damascus steel these days - pattern welding is just the most common, I think. That's why you can find blades for sale as low as $30 (yeah, at the local gun show here) and up into the thousands. Unfortunately, the original techniques are lost and may never be rediscovered, even if there are some that swear they've figured it out.

The main reason "original" damascus steel came to be was that [what considered to be] high quality steel was very rare and expensive back in the day. Smiths mixed it with lower quality steel to make somewhat descent (by today's standards) weapons.
There's no reason to look for the old recipe (other then it's historical value) as quality of damascus forged today exceeds the old one.