How did Empus obtain steel?

[Battara]

I agree Alan. That is why earlier Moro and Filipino smiths also blended layers of soft and harder steels for strength and impact resilience, especially since they did not use thrusting as much as slashing and cutting.

[A. G. Maisey]

If you forge weld layers of steel with varying content of carbon, what you're doing is producing mechanical damascus. The technique was known in a number of places throughout the world, and although one of the benefits is a product with a more aggressive edge than homogenous steel, as well as a high durability factor, the big benefit in times past when quality steel was not so easy to get hold of, was that by combining the varying qualities of material it permitted the cheaper, often locally produced material to be used to extend the quantity of the the more expensive material.

Javanese smiths used the same rationale of extending high quality material by adding low quality material to it, but they used a much more economical method by constructing the body of the blade from iron, and the cutting edge only from steel. This cutting edge was not always a wafer that went the full width of the blade, but in older blades was frequently only a thin wafer that ran around the circumference of the blade, as with Viking blades and Merovingian blades.

In my previous post I was talking about keris construction, but other old Javanese blades also can be found to use this same method of construction where only the edge is steel. Pretty much like some Scandinavian knives of today.

[Tatyana Dianova]

The Pamor on this Balinese Keris looks like it was made of some kind of crucible steel, although a metallurgical analysis is needed to be sure...

[Seerp Visser]

I red an article from a Dutch scientist visiting one of the islands (Sulawesi?) and describing that there they were making crucible steel. They used the material for their plows.
I cannot find the article but will look further for it and post it as soon as i find it.

Furthermore there is an article that describes the way of making iron/steel by the Dajaks.
They put a layer of charcoal on the bottom of their furnaces. On this way they add carbon into the bloomery iron and can make a kind of steel.

[David]

Originally Posted by Tatyana Dianova

The Pamor on this Balinese Keris looks like it was made of some kind of crucible steel, although a metallurgical analysis is needed to be sure...

This seems unlikely to me Tatyana. Pamor is generally not steel. The word literally means "mixture" and it is generally a mix of various iron ores with varying ferric and/or nickelous content.

[A. G. Maisey]

This is worth a read:-

http://www.oxis.org/theses/misol-2103.pdf

[David]

Wow, brilliant find Alan, thanks!

[A. G. Maisey]

Got lots of these papers David, both online stuff and hardcopy.

There's a good one done by an Aussie team, but I forget the details, it might be in hardcopy, not online, don't have time to look right now.

edit:- Land of Iron, Bulbeck & Caldwell

This is actually an archaeological investigation of settlement related to Luwu, but included in results is mention that iron smelting in Luwu might have begun as early as 600CE, and was certainly under way between 1480 and 1630, they hypothesise that most of the production was exported to Jawa and talk about use in keris & etc. In any case this work supports the fact that iron was imported into Jawa.

For anybody with an interest in this sort of thing, a good place to start is probably "The Bronze-Iron Age of Indonesia". van Heekeren