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23rd February 2016, 01:54 PM
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here's closeup of a modern Indian-made Kard that can be picked up for under $200, and not the best by far. There are wootz(?) ingots with better "structure" readily available for less than $100. I do not understand what is the big deal with Russian geniuses creating unimaginable bulat masterpieces? Are they any different or am I missing something?
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23rd February 2016, 07:40 PM
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Arms Historian
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Location: Route 66
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Ibrahiim, thank you for that outstanding synopsis bringing the essential theme topic back into the discussion. It has been an amazing discussion bringing together the many facets of this industry and the mysterious watered steel so sought after. It is amazing that even into our times there is research continuing.
I think that the focus on the Russian scientific and craftsmanship factors is most interesting and most likely the case because of the notable instances which pertain to the rediscovery of much of the wootz mystery. While obviously there are a good number of other areas involved, the work by Anosov in the research angles is of course key. As with most industry and craftsmanship, there are likely to be many levels and degrees of quality and production. It is extremely interesting to see these pointed out in the observations and illustrations that continue being presented here. Thank you! |
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25th February 2016, 12:06 AM
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I contacted Kirill Rivkin and asked him about Anosov's bulat. Kirill inspected Hermitage collection and many other collections of Anosov's blades and has first-hand knowledge.
Here is his e-mail: __________________________________________________ ________ Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2016 3:38 PM To: Barkan, Ariel Attachments: Anosov claimed that he reproduced 11 different types of Bulat patterns; the problem is that his definition of what each pattern means is very different from what we tend to use today. For example, there is a sword in Tsarskoe Selo collection which is signed "Amal Taban" which was held by many as the definition of Taban pattern. However, this blade is not even wootz; in fact most likely its a Georgian imitation of Assad Allah. During Anosov's time the definition of wootz was very wide; he personally included Japanese swords in this class, as well as many swords that were classified in old Russian records as "red bulat" - but which today most would not consider to be wootz. But even today people there are still arguments, at the core of which is how separate are the terms "crucible steel" and wootz. If we are to include some very basic crucible steel patterns as wootz, then practically all Sheffield cutlery is wootz, it just needs lots of acid, etc. If we are to concentrate of first class Persian+ patterns from XVIIIth century as the "standard" of wootz, then it is a much more narrow field. Regarding the production of Zlatoust bulat, including those specifically signed as Anosov's bulat, almost all was done in 1841-1845, i.e. a relatively short time period. It is very low contrast (actually mechanical damascus ones from the same period are much more showy), with relatively short, straight lines (typically longer on higher quality swords, but approaching "salt and pepper" on lower end stuff). Sometimes the lines are curving a little. It is not that similar to what we would consider to be a true Persian Taban today. __________________________________________________ ______- In view of this information obtained from a knowledgeable professional, quotations from Anosov's works as well as re-tellings of Anosov's testimonials by other people become highly questionable and cannot be relied upon. Thus, actual documented examples of his "bulat" need to be seen by our own eyes. |
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25th February 2016, 04:02 AM
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25th February 2016, 03:06 PM
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25th February 2016, 03:43 PM
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25th February 2016, 03:59 PM
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It is unfortunate that images of the blades that Anosov made are not available to see. Ann Feuerbach did get to see one of his blades.
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25th February 2016, 01:29 PM
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http://www.geostudio.pl/wordpress/?p=830 And a brilliant paper at file:///C:/Users/LENOVO/Downloads/102-103-1-PB%20(1).pdf May I add...and this is not a complaint !! The thread comes in at master class level and leaves a lot of potential students somewhat in its wake...I therefor add a brief note on the background so that members can quickly get up to flying speed on this subject. Here is the rendition from Wikepedia which sets down some basic principles and groundwork viz; Quote"Bulat is a type of steel alloy known in Russia from medieval times; regularly being mentioned in Russian legends as the material of choice for cold steel. The name булат is a Russian transliteration of the Persian word fulad, meaning steel. This type of steel was used by the armies of the nomadic people who were struggling to develop their smithing techniques. Bulat steel was the main type of steel used for swords in the armies of Genghis Khan, the great emperor of the Mongolian Empire. The technique used in making wootz steel has been lost for centuries and the bulat steel used today makes use of a more recently developed technique. Contents 1 History 2 Structure 3 Bibliography 4 See also History The secret of bulat manufacturing was lost by the beginning of the 19th century. Pavel Anosov eventually managed to duplicate the qualities of that metal in 1838, when he completed ten years of study into the nature of Damascus steel swords. Bulat became popular in cannon manufacturing, until the Bessemer process was able to make the same quality steels for far less money. Anosov had entered the Saint Petersburg Mine Cadet School in 1810, where a Damascus steel sword was stored in a display case. He became enchanted with the sword, and was filled with stories of them slashing through their European counterparts. In November 1817 he was sent to the factories of Zlatoust mining region in the southern Urals, where he was soon promoted to the inspector of the "weapon decoration department". Here he again came into contact with Damascus steel of European origin (which was in fact pattern welded steel, and not at all similar), but quickly found that this steel was quite inferior to the original from the Middle East. Anosov had been working with various quenching techniques, and decided to attempt to duplicate Damascus steel with quenching. He eventually developed a methodology that greatly increased the hardness of his steels. Structure Carbon steel consists of two components: pure iron, in the form of ferrite, and cementite or iron carbide, a compound of iron and carbon. Cementite is very hard and brittle; its hardness is about 640 by the Brinell hardness test, whereas ferrite is only 200. The amount of the carbon and the cooling regimen determine the crystalline and chemical composition of the final steel. In bulat, the slow cooling process allowed the cementite to precipitate as micro particles in between ferrite crystals and arrange in random patterns. The color of the carbide is dark while steel is grey. This mixture is what leads to the famous patterning of Damascus steel. Cementite is essentially a ceramic, which accounts for the sharpness of the Damascus (and bulat) steel. Cementite is unstable and breaks down between 600–1100 °C into ferrite and carbon, so working the hot metal must be done very carefully. Bibliography; The Mystery of Damascus Blades, by John D. Verhoeven in Scientific American, No 1, pages 74–79, 2001. History of Metallography: The Development of Ideas on the Structure of Metals before 1890. Cyril S. Smith. MIT Press, 1988. On Damascus Steel. Leo S. Figiel. Atlantis Arts Press, 1991. Archaeotechnology: The Key Role of Impurities in Ancient Damascus Steel Blades. J. D. Verhoeven, A. H. Pendray and W. E. Dauksch in JOM: A Publication of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, Vol. 50, No. 9, pages 58–64; September 1998. Available at http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM...even-9809.html "Unquote. Regards, Ibrahiim al Balooshi. Last edited by Ibrahiim al Balooshi; 25th February 2016 at 02:02 PM. |
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25th February 2016, 02:49 PM
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This shows that an ingot of crucible made in the proper manner had the necessary ingredients to forge a watered steel blade but Ann Feuerbach in "Crucible Damascus Steel: A Fascination for Almost 2,000 Years" says that not all ingots would necessarily produce a pattern.
Pattern formation in wootz damascus steel swords and blades - John Verhoeven Last edited by estcrh; 25th February 2016 at 03:24 PM. |
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25th February 2016, 03:16 PM
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#10 |
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Cool thanks Eric.
Greg Obach followed this same process, producing a low-carbon rim around the high-carbon centre. Metallurgy rocks!!! |
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25th February 2016, 03:42 PM
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I have read several theories about how physical manipulation of the steel during the forging process such as cutting grooves in a crucible steel blade blank was the method used to create certain damascus patterns.
Pattern formation in wootz damascus steel swords and blades - John Verhoeven Last edited by estcrh; 25th February 2016 at 08:17 PM. |
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25th February 2016, 06:51 PM
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#12 | |
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Ibrahiim, This blurb from Wiki contains so many silly errors that I am sorely tempted not to use Wiki again even for a question whether tigers are vegetarians :-)))) Mongols of 13th century had no wootz ( bulat) Nobody, EVER made barrels of firearms from wootz. Anosov's bulat process did not depend on quenching. He did not increase hardness of bulat: all "bulats" ( wootz) have Rockwell C hardness in the range between 20 and 35. |
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27th February 2016, 05:48 PM
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#13 | |
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Salaams Ariel, I am late in answering since it has taken me a while to try to discover the Barrel Making techniques particularly in Persian gun making...but in fact these are virtually unrecorded. I note the following which is interesting as it supports the almost unknown nature of this technique ... from ... http://www.iranicaonline.org/article...on-and-muskets Quote" Despite the availability of a technical text such as this, the chancellor of Shah Solṭān Ḥosayn (1105-35 /1694-1722) sent a letter to Louis XIV of France requesting several makers of cannons and other firearms (Qāʾem-maqāmī, p. 114). During the reign of Nāder Shah (1148-60/1736-47), material and craftsman for gun-making were also summoned to Marv in preparation for a campaign in Central Asia (Marvī, pp. 911-12), but no technical information about this is available. In the Qajar period new techniques of cannon making were introduced from Europe by Prince ʿAbbās Mīrzā. The core mold was no longer employed, and the cannon barrel was bored with a boring mill constructed according to European models. The improvement in technical performance was remarkable. If a cannon during Nāder Shah’s campaign against the Afghans needed 20 to 30 persons to be loaded and fired and 100 to be carried, the new ones needed only 4 to 5 persons and 4 horses (Donbolī, pp. 133-34). In this period some books on artillery were translated from European languages into Persian (Afšār, pp. 90-91), but they contained little or no information about cannon making (e.g., Māzandarānī). Musket making. The best description of musket-making is found in the travel account of Jean Chardin (q.v.), who visited Persia in the second half of the 17th century. Persian muskets, according to him, were all match-locks (Chardin III, p. 558), as at the end of the 16th century when 300 musketeers from Isfahan ignited their matches before attacking the Uzbeks (Eskandar Beg, p. 466). According to Chardin, the barrels of these muskets were heavy, thick, and damascened." Unquote. Perhaps, therefor, it is not a matter of these barrels never existing but more associated with the fact that no record was ever allowed / made recording the secretive method... It does seem however that in some cases where damascening took place on hand held guns that this was as a decorative technique rather than actual gun barrel manufacture. The following is noted from http://firearmshistory.blogspot.com/...welded-or.html Quote"... wootz steel (the steel used in the so-called "damascus blades") was NOT used to make damascus barrels very much. William Greener in his Gunnery in 1858: Being a Treatise on Rifles, Cannon and Sporting Arms writes that these barrels are rare and on examination of the available barrels made by wootz steel workers, most were actually were made of commonest iron with a very thin plate of wootz steel around them, indicating that the wootz steel ore was becoming very valuable, since the mine in India where the ore came from was running out. Instead of using wootz steel, the more common option was to use pattern welded steel and the reason that they were called damascus barrels is because the patterns on the pattern welded steel resembled that made from wootz steel. So the name "damascus" is a misnomer and when we say "damascus barrels", we really mean "pattern welded barrels". In pattern welding, two or more metals are used to make the barrel (usually iron and steel bars, or steel bars of varying carbon content)."Unquote. I therefor suggest that before this period of dwindling supplies of Wootz ore...that Cannon Barrels may have been attempted and that the technique was lost but that the secondary reason ...that of the time problem...when the raw ingredients ran out may be masking the fact that wootz may have been used in Barrel Making previously...but we just cannot see it.  Regards, Ibrahiim al Balooshi. Last edited by Ibrahiim al Balooshi; 27th February 2016 at 06:02 PM. |
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27th February 2016, 08:27 PM
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Location: Ann Arbor, MI
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I have yet to see a single barrel made out of wootz. Plenty of acid-etched damascening, plenty of pattern-welded ones, but not wootz.
Barrels were either cast whole, or made out of spiral billets welded together. The former is obviously impractical taking into account small size of crucibles and the requirement for slow cooling to allow formation of the dendrites. As to the latter, perhaps the strongest argument against it is the purely ceremonial nature of the so-called " chevron" blades, with segments of wootz welded to segments of plain or pattern-welded steel. There are always cracks in the welds, making the blade unusable for fighting. But if the same technique is used for a barrel, the gases will tear the whole structure apart. This, BTW, is the main reason why modern barrels are not using spiral welds any more, and just drill a hole in a long steel cylinder. Last edited by ariel; 27th February 2016 at 08:47 PM. |
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27th February 2016, 09:09 PM
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Arms Historian
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I wonder if it is just me, or does it not seem the majority of the issues at hand have to do with trying to agree of terms used for certain types or forms of crucible steel. The semantics and transliterations as well as obvious misperceptions in accounts, records and many sources seem to have the characteristic disparities resultant from varying perspectives of the observers and their own vocabularies.
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4th March 2016, 06:28 PM
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I too have not seen wootz barrels, but I did see and Dr. Figiel has in his book chevron welded gun barrels... one may call that pattern "multiple chevron" as it zig-zags more than one slow chevron. As per Dr. Alan Williams' research there are armor pieces which have wootz welded to common bloomery iron as a laminated material. One could suggest that such was done with barrels, but again I have not seen one. Ric |
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