Speaking of interesting knives...
 

Jens, what is that pic you posted of? Obviously, a knife, and it looks like Wootz steel, but did you make it? What are the decorations made from, gold? That's quite an interesting piece, can you tell us more about it?

Sincerely,
Michael
www.radharcknives.com

Hi Michael,

The picture is a detail of a blade – see the attached.
Tegha. Rajasthan. 18th century. The blade is wootz and the decorations are gold koft gari.

Below are a few links, which may be of interest to you, if you make a search, you will of course find a lot more.



http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=292&highlight=meteoric

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=269&highlight=meteoric

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=465&highlight=meteoric

Links and magnetism
 

Hello Jens, and thank you for the links. That's quite a blade. I checked out some of the posts on the links you sent. It made me curious, and I grabbed a compass and ran it along several blades that I've forged and made into knives. They do all sorts of things. Some hardly move the compass, some make it spin, some move it back and forth. LOL!

I didn't do anything special to any of them to induce any sort of magnetism or magnetic fields in them, so am not sure what creates the different effects. Interesting nonetheless...

Michael
www.radharcknives.com

Wootz Cake
 

A few weeks ago Some wootz came on Ebay The seller made this statement " I found this antic piece of wootz cake or wootz bar in Rajasthan, India. It is an find from an old blacksmith of the Sikligar cast.." They sold for reasonable prices so I bid on some and won one mindful that from forum info that they most likely were millballs. It came in and it appears to be wootz after a less than final polishing. What do you think? Always looking for wootz items.
thanks, Steve

Steve,
I am not questioning the statement made by the seller about these cakes coming from India and being antique. It wery well could be. However, there are modern methods to produce them. See this: New_Wootz
The process describes making wootz cakes using cast iron, the freshly crushed green glass, dandelions and iron powder. It also shows four of these cakes, too bad no close-ups available for visual comparison.
I do not know if 'new' cakes will look the same as yours, or whether they'd show the same wootz pattern upon etching, or how to tell if they're authentic. Perhaps Rick will agree to comment.

Reply
 

Alchemy lives on, that's a wild formula you have to wonder how it came about. I only bought one 175 Grams for a bit over a twenty so, it was like a lottery ticket. I knew if i got one of the larger ones I'd have put it to a hammer. This ones too small and will remain a great paperweight.
Thanks, for the info, Steve

Here a link he sent regarding testing all in German http://members.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI....erid=wootzcake

I’m sure Ric has something to say about these, too, but since they are a pet peeve of mine I’ll recap a couple reasons from earlier in the thread - you can be confident these are not wootz, modern or ancient.
1. They do not look like ingots of metal that were melted in small crucibles, those are shaped like the bottom of a crucible on one side, and like solidified liquid on the other. The shape of the crucible can differ, but if you look at the image below I think you will see what I mean – that is a sectioned ingot of 19th century Indian wootz that shows up in Smith’s “The History of Metallography” and Figiel’s book.
2. All steels solidify with a dendritic structure, not just wootz, so that is irrelevant but often comes up because people first hear of crystalline dendrites in steel via wootz.
3. Despite what he says in on his page, the chemistry of historic wootz is very consistent, the amounts of the various elements tend to vary by just tenths of a percent. Here’s a table that shows just how far out of line his product is - numbers that are more than a few tenths of a percent off are very significant, and in this case they point directly away from wootz.