Gene –the blades are of my own crucible steel, and thanks for the compliment!
I just forged out one mill ball into a bar, because it is surprising and interesting to me that there are these modern items that are similar to wootz, and that someone would start selling them as wootz.
I think the collector community will need to be on the lookout for more convincing fakes as the awareness of how wootz was made spreads.
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The word wootz has, to collectors of Oriental arms, had an almost magical spell to it, you have however made the magic spell evaporate, and leave us with ‘Wootz is not wootz, unless it is wootz – of course’
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Jens, I hope the magic hasn’t really evaporated! Those beautiful antique blades are still magic to me, even as I try to understand how they were made. The magic might get a little obscured if you start trying to nail down every molecule and assign everything into boxes, but those blades are still amazingly sharp, flexible and mysterious, and it is still very difficult to make modern steel that matches them.
These are the photos of complete knives I have on line now:
Persian style:
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~jlp3/...Persian15a.jpg
Modern style:
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~jlp3/...wootzQT07s.jpg
Regarding the russian knife, yes, it looks like the contemporary russian bulat in grain structure from the picture.
The pictured tests are supposed to show how macho the metal is - hammer it thru a bolt w/o damage - this would have been impressive, but I recently saw a photo of the same thing done with a hardened railroad spike, which are not extra-special steel, or even high carbon.
Shave a nail - This is also not a big deal, any knife that is correctly heat treated will pull a curl of metal off a nail w/o damage. I do this test with all my knives.
Scratch glass - that's a good one, ultra-high-carbon wootz should be able to scratch glass and still be as flexible as a regular knife.
Now if he was doing the paper cuts after all that, without re-sharpening, that'd be a damn fine knife, but I don't know the order of the tests.
My three cents
Jeff