[ariel]

Originally Posted by Rivkin

Fugh. I finished going through the original Anosov's report "On Bulats". It is a fantastic work. There are two comments that I would make:

a. I have to take back my statements about inconsistency in chemical composition etc. It is impossible to make such statements, since there are no less than four distinctive processes to make bulat per Anosov, and there are dozens of ways he combined ingridients, tempering and so on. For example, to enrich the blade with carbon he tried graphite, different kinds of wood and even diamonds, with different results.

b. Unfortunately here we have the same story as with later literature - as soon as we get to the performance of wootz blades, the "magic" replaces the science. In his introduction he talks a lot about how good bulat blades are. To give you an example, one of his strong points is that japanese blades (undoubtfully made from bulat) are very good - chop iron etc. This and other arguments are rather obvious misrepresentations of what bulat really is, and btw I know a strange guy who tests his chechen kindjals by attempting to cut hard steel _drills_, which is by far nothing like iron.

Conclusion, which is also about the quality, this time of Anosov's bulats is also highly disappointing. Short text with no reproducable experiments (i.e. such blade is compared to such blade) that cites for example that Anosov was not able to make from english steel the blades that cut as fine cloth as the one made from his bulat (properly prepared). It can be interpreted as something that shows the superiority of bulat. However one also has to note that Anosov's experiments were quite complex to reproduce and required collosal work to determine the right tempering, ingridients and so on, resulting in a very expensive and very capritious with respect to the conditions of making (i.e. improper making would not produce such good results) end product. On one side it is possible that top wootz smiths produced steel far superior to ordinary pre XXth century steels; on the other hand comparison was made with mass produced english steel - who can vouch that some top quality steelmakers would not make something much better ?

RSWORD just posted this:
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=3680
No matter how many uncertainties are there in the Anosov's book, the final result was terrific