Not quite YS.
This "prayers in steel" thing is, I believe, pretty new, but it is understandable.
It is not something I ever heard from the people who taught me, I have the feeling that the idea might have originated in the Jogja community.
There are a couple of things that we might consider when thinking about this "prayers in steel" thing.
Firstly, there is very, very little steel in a keris, so clearly the phrase was initiated by somebody who understood a minimal amount about the technology of making a keris.
Secondly there are some people who believe that when the Mpu prays during actual production of the keris the material records his prayers, and those prayers are embedded in the material of the keris forever. I did not hear this belief from the people who taught me.
Thirdly, if read from left to right when the tip of the blade is pointing up, and the gandhik is to the left of the person holding the keris, what we do have is a prayer.
Before praying to other deities many, if not most Hindu devotees offer a brief prayer to Ganesha, and the Kembang Kacang represents Ganesha, in the event that the Kembang Kacang has a Jenggotan, we will see the RonDha, and the Ron Dha can be read as the shortest mantra "AUM", the Blumbangan is representative of the Yoni, the Sogokan a representation of the Lingga, which in turn symbolises Siwa, where a greneng is present we see the RonDha again, so the prayer closes with the shortest mantra "AUM".
So:- AUM>Ganesha>Yoni>Lingga> AUM
and of course, apart from the symbolism related to Mount Meru (Mount Kailash), and the other ways in which the keris can be understood, we have the keris as symbolic of Siwa himself.
When the symbolism of the keris is understood it is very easy to understand why Islam needed to be very proactive in trying to remove the pre-Islamic symbolism from the keris and to replace that with ideas that were more acceptable to Islam.
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