Is gold or suasa 'better'?

[David]

Originally Posted by kai

This is a general feature (for digital texts) which does not work with photographed sources as in this case.

Sorry Kai, but you are incorrect on that one. Try putting in a word you know is there such as "Suaffa" or "Batavia". The search engine works just fine and the one on the bottom will give you indictor marks of all the places in the text where the word appears. Hover over the indicator and the passage will appear in a pop-up or click on the indicator and it will bring you directly to the page.
What this tells me is the the words "Sussuhunam" or "Susuhunan" are not in this text.
However, what i failed to do was to use "ff" instead of "ss" when searching the text. So one must search for "Suffuhunam" instead. The only references point for this word in the text appear to be three, on pages 204, 205 and 206.

[Shakethetrees]

Is there any authoritative information available giving the composition of suassa?

I suspect it is a somewhat variable mix that was determined by availability, local tradition, or even the smith's personal composition.

There seems to be a good deal of color variation.

Alloys have always fascinated me, especially the ones that go against the Western tradition of maintaining a certain gold or silver standard.

What comes to mind are the many Japanese alloys developed for sword mount furniture, where minuscule amounts of precious metals were mixed with copper and other metals and treated with various chemicals achieving colors unavailable to traditional western metalwork.

This is something that should be studied.