[A. G. Maisey]

There's a lot more to this whole "nature of iron" business.

The wrought iron I mentioned is the stuff that blacksmiths used right up until probably WWI. I don't think it has been made for maybe 80 or 90 years, mild steel has taken its place. Some mild steel can be very low carbon content, like roadside guard rails, and this material behaves a bit like wrought iron in the fire, other mild steel can approach a carbon content where you can harden it and maybe get a pretty fair cutting edge out of it.

Wrought iron came from a few different processes.Iron ore and charcoal were put into a smelter---I think the technical name for these smelters is "bloomery", the smelter was fired up, the temperature was below iron melt point, the slag in the ore melted and ran out of the smelter, the iron was left. This iron was called a bloom. The bloom then had to be worked through forge processes---forge out, weld, fold, weld, forge out again and again---before it was suitable to use for making things. All those weld joints were without residual slag, the rest of the material behind the weld joints still contained impurities, with age and erosion the impure material wastes away, leaving the pure material of the weld joint. This is the "hair", or "wire", or cable" that you see in the grain of the iron.Lots and lots of welds = lots and lots of weld joints = fine grain. A few welds = coarse grain.

The nature of the impurity was usually excess sulphur, or excess phosphorus, or---if you let the smelter get too hot and carbon melted into the iron--- carbon. Excess sulphur produced hot short material----that is, iron that breaks up under the hammer and will not weld and forge easily---- excess phosphorus produced cold short material---that is, iron that will not bend when it is cold. The combination of these two types of material was a necessary technique in order to increase the amount of available material----Jawa was iron poor---so what the smiths did was weld hot short material containing sulphur with cold short material that contained phosphorus. The two materials together produced a useable material without as much loss in the forge, which would have occurred if each had been subjected to the amount of forging and rewelding that would have been necessary to produce good, dense, pure iron. You can lose a tremendous amount of material when you go through the forge out, reweld process.

So, combination of the two different types of iron became a necessity.

Now, guess what?

Iron that has an excess of phosphorus has a much paler appearance than iron that has an excess of sulphur.It is "white iron".

By combining these two types of iron we had the beginnings of pamor.The two materials were mixed for a totally practical, economic reason, and as this technique developed, it became a virtue, and a necessary part of the keris blade.

One way you can save on work-time and charcoal in doing this sort of washing work, especially with very dirty material, is by shortcutting the process, and twisting the material instead of forging out flat and rewelding, so when you get the material clean enough to withstand a twist, you clamp one end of it at weld heat, twist it, then reweld----and repeat and repeat as necessary. The end result of this process is what we call pamor miring, a pamor type much more highly regarded than pamor mlumah, which has only been cleaned up by flat welding. Hi-tech material as against lo-tech material.

But how did these primitive smiths, working with a hole in the ground , a little bit of charcoal, and two feather dusters to bring the fire to weld heat, identify the phosphorous rich "white iron"?

They did not have access to metallurgical analysis, nor laboratories.

Phosphorus rich iron is cold short. Won't bend when cold, but shatters. Hold a lump of it firmly, whack it with a hammer, it simply breaks. Sulphur rich iron bends easy when cold. Pretty clever blokes those old smiths. They could tell with a hammer what it now takes metallurgists with millions of dollars worth of equipment and a university education to find out.

The other sort of iron impurity was carbon, but carbon rich iron has a useful property, it can be made hard.In essence, it is steel. But its a bit difficult to weld, and welds at a lower heat than iron, so to make it useable the carbon had to be burnt out by the same technique used to clean up the other impurities. We call this "washing". But a small amount of residual carbon remained after the washing, this allowed the material to be hardened. So the three types of iron from the smelter were used:- the material that was black and sulphur rich from one source, the material that was white and phosphorus rich from a different source, and the material that had got screwed up by allowing the smelter to get too hot, and had absorbed carbon and had become pig iron.

Of course, sometimes , in some specific locations, smelters were designed to deliberately produce the carbon rich material. Ever heard of wootz?

Anyway, smelter iron, or bloomery iron had pretty much disappeared by the end of the 18th century. It was replaced by iron produced from blast furnaces. Because blast furnaces ran much hotter than smelters, what they produced was pig iron, material that had an excess of carbon, but with other impurities pretty much burnt out of the ore during the process. Regretably, blast furnaces used coke, a mineral fuel, and the mineral impurities melted into the pig, along with carbon. To make the pig iron useable it had to be washed, the same as the material from a smelter. There were industrial processes developed to do this, about which I know nothing, but to a blacksmith it meant that he had to work the pig in a similar way to the way in which he worked a bloom.

If we want to relate this to keris, we can probably generalise that old period keris were made of bloomery iron, and new period keris were made of pig iron.

When this happened, the smiths had a bit of a problem. They no longer had access to the white iron produced by the smelter, except in (possibly) very small quantities from local smelters. Their customers wanted those pretty white lines on the blade that guaranteed quality---the lines and patterns made by welding sulphur rich and phosphorus rich iron together, giving a mixed material ---"pamor"---pamor means mixed.

So the smiths had to find another way of producing that white effect. This is probably when the nickel rich ores from Luwu in Sulawesi came into their own. These ores , when welded with the washed pig iron , produced a nice, contrasting effect---exactly what the customers wanted.

Old period keris = bloomery iron; new period keris (nem-neman) = pig iron.

Old period keris = pamor produced by two types of iron; new period keris = keris produced by iron + nickel.

Then there's the wild card, meteorites with nickel, but we won't talk about them, thanks. Or titanium.

When you look at the way customs, traditions, social norms develop, you can nearly always find a good, solid, practical reason at the root. All these dietary restrictions practiced by various religions had good, solid practical reasons at the time and place where they originated. Same thing with keris, all those pretty little blade patterns had a good solid reason when they first appeared.