The aesthetic beauty of a patterned blade

[Gavin Nugent]

Originally Posted by RSWORD

Thanks for sharing some examples Gavin. I particularly like the Bugis blade with the fine horse tooth Hamon in addition to the central pattern. Superb!

Thanks Rick.

I do see how the Malay people and other Keris collectors refer to the pamor as shark teeth as the repeated pattern layering back to the centre looks like rows of shark teeth, where as the Chinese Horse tooth patterns seen to often lack this depth of rows.

Gavin

[Oriental-Arms]

In the mid 90's I visited Jaipur and in one of the arms dealer shops I met an old guy, sitting on the floor, legs crossed, polishing a knife blade with a small stone glued to a short wood stick. Worked very slowly as if he has all the time in the world. I visited the shop every day to watch the polishing process advancing. after a week or so he deep the blade into a bowl with acid for 24 hours. He refused of course to tell me what type of acid he used, just mentioned it is an extract from a natural plant. here is the result. One of the best wootz pattern I have seen.

[estcrh]

Here is another type of pattern, it is a Japanese yoroi doshi tanto, 1800s, Gassan school with "ayasugi hada" which looks like a series of undulating rolling waves. Various schools of swordsmiths in Japan were able to replicate the identifying traits of their particular school which they made by manipulating laminated steel billets in various configurations some of which are shown below. Yoroi doshi tanto are an armor piercing blade which are extremely thick at the spine, this one is .5 inches. You can see the lamination on this, it appears to have an two sides of folded steel with a hardened core which can especially be seen at the point of the blade.