I just got a look at a sword made of two ingots, welded together near the middle of the blade, and there were the remains of cuts where the smith had inlaid an inscription on both sides where the seam showed – I wonder what it said? Hopefully I can get a photo of it. I have also seen more than a few swords where the wootz had been used to sandwich regular steel in the center, so they had ways of extending their ingots to sword length.
I’ve only seen a couple items referred to as ‘Turkish’ wootz, they looked like what is also called ‘sham’, or in other words, nothing special.
The terms are not uniformly well defined, I think. They are all visual descriptives, so would only imply mechanical differences accidentally, if the mechanical difference manifested also in the pattern.
Kirk Narduban is referring to a pattern manipulation and so does not have any practical difference.
Those blades I’ve seen referred to as ‘shams’ all look (to me
) to be steel of lower carbon than what we makers think of today as wootz, if that is the case then there would be a difference – Sham blades would act just like regular blades, since the steel is about the same. When al Kindi wrote about second-class blades which did not show a pattern until you threw acid on them, I think this is what he was referring to.
Kara Khorasan and Kara Toban are probably similar in mechanical properties to each other, but different than shams.
Take a look at figure 2 in this article and see if you can put a name to each of the four wootz blades…
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM...even-9809.html