The 34-inch blade is made of two types of steel, intricately folded, twisted, and beaten into a single seamless shape. The spine was made from a piece of wrought iron pulled from the earth by Shearer on Smelter Hill, where a great smelter, hearkening from the earliest days of Mines, in the 1900s, once stood.

“It’s cool to incorporate history into a new product like this,” Shearer said.

While the iron spine of the blade gives it its flexibility, the core and cutting edge are made of a harder, high carbon steel mixed with nickel. Suspending the blade in a bath of acid etched it with the shimmering spirals and whorls that play across its surface, revealing each painstaking step that went into its creation.

“It tells the story of how the metal flowed from the beginning,” Ade said.

The handle is Finnish Masur birch wood, with spacers made of local birch bark, and fitted with a bronze guard and pommel, all shaped by hand.

The combined result is a masterpiece of craftsmanship that took more than 140 man hours to forge. The prize came with a medal, $2,000 cash and a book of technical documents about the forging of Damascus steel.