[mariusgmioc]

... but not surprising at all.

Pretty much everything he said was well known or intuitively deductible for anybody familiar with steels and their properties.
However, his main "surprise" conclusion is about "damascus cutting properties" which I believe to be completely irrelevant.

He concludes that pattern welded damascus cuts better because of a serrations effect between hard and soft layers.

However, it is unclear what this "cuts better" means as cutting properties depend hugely of the geometry and microgeometry of the edge not of the material of the knife (mostly as there are some subtle nuances even here). So this whole "cutting well" discussion is an upstart fallacy, and I have suspicions that his testing method does not respect all the rigors necessary to reach a valid conclusion. More specifically, there are way too many parameters to take into account to be able to draw a correct conclusion and the omission of one single parameter, no matter how insignificant it may be, can lead to fundamentally different results.

For example, the cutting properties depend significantly (among others) of the angle by which the edge was sharpened and the grit of the sharpening stone. If the sharpening was done along the edge line, the cutting effect may be worse than if the sharpening was done perpendicular to the edge. If the sharpening is done perpendicular to the edge the grit of the sharpening stone creates micro-serrations in the edge that help its cutting properties. However, each material is cut better with a specific size of these micro-serrations, micro-serration that at their turn are dependent on the grit of sharpening stone. So the micro-serrations that cut meat better might be worse at cutting potatoes.

Moreover, while modern mono-steels can guarantee a good level of consistency in conducting cutting tests, pattern-welded damascus is much less consistent, as it is practically almost impossible to predict the micro-geometry at the very cutting edge that will result after sharpening, because of the heterogenous nature of pattern-welded damascus. So, if you have three billets of the same pattern-welded damascus and you sharpen them exactly the same way, you may end up with three blades with three different cutting properties, resulted from three different edge micro-geometries that in their turn are the result of the heterogeneous structure of the pattern-welded damascus.