How is a pen wrought?

The beauty of Damascus steel is legendary, with swords traced back to 1100AD. Damascus is  hot-forged, combining multiple steel alloys. The steel maker heats, hammers, bends, twists and folds the material to produce unique patterns which permeate throughout the entire piece of steel. Our Damascus steel end caps, or pattern-welded steel end caps, are composed of three different alloys. The colors are brought out by heating the cap to a specific temperature that allows the different steel alloys to oxidize and display their characteristic colors. The Damascus steel used in this limited edition of 18 was forged by Chris Marks combining pure nickel and two different carbon steel alloys. It takes a full day at the forge to make a batch for us and we use about 5cm of Damascus for each pen