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Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey
The Prambanan meteorite has somewhere between 5% and 10% nickel content, depending upon which analysis we refer to.
10% of 220grams is 22 grams, so 22gm. of nickel. This is not too much for a normal size keris.
The way that meteorite is welded in Jawa is by putting little lumps of it into an iron envelope, you weld the envelope, fold and weld a number of times, in my experience 8 or 10 times is about enough, you know when the material is clean because the billet at weld heat does not give off sparks. The meteoritic iron combines with the other iron and there is a more or less even distribution of nickel throughout the billet.
If we want to weld a simple mlumah pamor, like wos wutah we can then go ahead, split the pamor billet and put the steel core into it, however, if we want to weld a more complex pamor that involves either billet manipulation in the forge, or surface manipulation of the finished billet for the keris, we will use more material, depending on the pamor, perhaps vastly more material, and this will call for a much larger basic billet of pamor to be forged, which means we need to use more of the contrasting material:- nickel.
If we were to weld, say, a ganggeng kanyut pamor, I personally doubt that 220grams of meteoritic material would be sufficient.
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Thank you Alan, for this more experienced answer. That would be quite a bit of meteorite then. Just to out that into perspective in today's world, given that chucks of iron/nickel meteorite average for about $10 a gram, that would mean that if you wanted someone to create such a keris the cost of just the pamor material alone could be well over $2000.
Would i be correct to assume that one could use smaller amounts of meteorite and make up the rest of the pamor with a more terrestrial metal just to be able to get a "taste" of meteorite into your blade? Would it be likely that this happened in many cases since the material was not easy to come?