i'll tell you a story..... when i was starting to make crucible steel... i was testing the boundaries of wootz.... so i deliberately made an ingot to have a carb level bellow 1%.... ( a sort of control experiment)
I forged it out.... heat treated and etched in the standard way..... suprised to see a nice watered pattern come out with a very short etch time.... ... confused, i shuffled this blade to the back of the pile thinking that i either -- goofed up the calculation for carb levels or... extra carbon was borrowed from the crucible...
-- anyhow.. i gave it to a friend and didn't look back....
now... Jeff had posted a knife awhile back that had a wootzy look.... but he'd stated that it was too low a carb to be wootz..... yet it looks identical to an Indian blade i've seen..... so what ? well if Jeff didn't have that blade tested, would he have known to catagorize this blade as " not wootz ".....
-- is this another No.8 sword ???
so what it boils down to is...... are we to split the hypoeutectic watered crucible steel (low carbon steel) off of the definition of wootz (basically following verhoeven's lead and discounting sword no 8's existence) or are we to look at the whole sample of watered steels from the middle ages and be inclusive of No 8
i'm not sure i can come up with a definition of wootz at the moment... if anything, I think it is just a crucible steel that is made in the wootz tradition of the middle ages...
I believe Jeff's point is excellent.... we should try to revisit Al-Kindi's classifications of watered steels... and look here for some answers
Greg
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