Wootz ingots, where do they all come from?

[Jeff Pringle]

Here is a photo of a cast steel mill ball, forged out and with a ladder pattern put into the steel:

For scale, the ladders are spaced ~ 14mm (½”)

A little more technical background: the beautiful patterns on wootz blades come from slight variations in alloy that happen as the metal cools from liquid to solid, and the way those variations are altered during forging and heat treating.
Since this was a small ball that had cooled rapidly, it had both a smallish initial structure and not a lot of stretching to get to knife-sized bar – so the pattern is small scale, looks wootzy through a loupe but to the naked eye appears granular. With more forging/stretching/heat cycling, it could be made to look like small-scale wootz to the naked eye.

If you have a slowly cooled structure & not a lot of stretching, you get a pattern like this:

(my steel, ~1% Carbon)

And with more stretching, it gets more towards what we think of as ‘wootz’:

(my steel, 0.79% Carbon, lines are 2.54 mm 1”)

So if you had some 20th century industrial trash, you could pass it off as 18th century wootz, and even work it into wootzy looking blades if it was roughly the right alloy, cooled slowly enough and worked extensively enough.
The fake wootz that I saw in person appeared to be a different alloy than the mill balls I picked up in the desert, but getting the right alloy seems not to matter much in terms of naked-eye patterning.
Jeff

[Mare Rosu]

Jeff GREAT looking blades
Are tell us that the blades shown are from the same type of cast steel mill ball?
Or are the last two your style of wootz? As you say the patterns of the last two blades are very wootzie, to me anyway
Regardless you do good work!
Jeff may I make a suggestion?
Place one, or more, of your knifes, like the last one shown in your last posting, on the Swap section of the Form. I as well as others I am sure, would be interested in acquiring one of your knives.
Keep in mind we are all friends on this forum and need to be treated nicely

I have not contacted Mr. Pendray but will do so and ask him about his wootz processes.
Gene

[Jens Nordlunde]

Jeff, what you write, and show, is most interesting, and I am sure it is new to most, if not all, the readers of this thread. 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’.

We, the collectors, should have been able to figure out, that ‘industrial trash steel’ in some case would produce a ‘kind’ of wootz if treated the right way, although I think few of us have thought along this lane.

Your explanation, about the way the pattern show, is very good and easy to follow, even for a layman, who has never worked with iron/wootz/steel. The pictures you show illustrates very well what you write in the text, and the two blades are very nice.

Please show us pictures of the whole knives.

Jens

[Mare Rosu]

Jens/Jeff
This is a link to an eBay item (Andrew it is closed )The blade looks somewhat like wootz. I think the picture has way to much contrast to really show the pattern naturally. I don't think you could or should cut a bolt with it.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...tem=7178995092

Gene
Update:
Scan down to the bottom of the listing and read some of the questions asked and the answers, also click on the "MORE" links. I do not read Russian, but the pictures look interesting.

[Jens Nordlunde]

Gene, I agree, this looks very strange, there is however a small chance that it could be the photo. On the other hand one would think the seller would get the best photos - but it has been seen before.

Jens

[Rick]

Those sure look like hacksaw cuts in that bolt to me .
I also followed the link to the other pictures ; I don't know what's being attempted with the nail in the vise photo but I can assure you that trying to hold a nail by its head in a vise and expect it to not move around under any kind of pressure is futile .

Just my personal opinion , YMMV .

[Jeff Pringle]

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.

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’

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