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Old 23rd April 2022, 01:27 PM   #8
ariel
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Location: Ann Arbor, MI
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Regretfully, none. There are beautiful blades dated within the period of his productive life, but we have no idea how mechanically good they are. The only, perhaps even apocryphal, story of Assadulla’s blades is the one where his sword cut through a helmet undamaged by the blades by other masters.
There is a sarcastic statement that out of the 300 blades he could have produced during his productive life at least 500 with his signature can be found in private European collections.
On top of that, some rather solid researchers suggest that there was no real Assadulla, and that his name was just a claim of superior quality used by a multitude of bladesmiths of widely different abilities.

Mechanically, wootz blades are of uneven quality, but there are many stories of their breakability. Their only unquestionable advantage is the beauty of their superficial patterns.
Old Indian smiths forged their ingots into cristalline pattern (“ salt-and-pepper”) while Ottomans largely produced simple Sham blades. Both groups claimed mechanical superiority of their blades over the Persian ones. But we do not dare testing these claims at the present time.

The pattern of wootz blades depends in large measure upon the technique of forging. Anosov succeeded producing wootz ingots ( industrial espionage, but that is another story), but his instructions were so confusing that after his death his coworkers could not reproduce the feat. Even worse, despite his claims of reproducing all known patterns of wootz, all his existing blades are Sham at best. Even his yataghan sent to Faraday as a plea for recognition has only small area of a weak Sham pattern.

Modern masters all over produce wootz, but the small secrets of forging technique require generations of experience

Thus, the secrets of wootz are still undiscovered, but who needs them? Modern metallurgy produces iron alloys of unquestionably superior quality.
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