Ed, I know that Kevin Cashen does, and I believe Raymond Rybar does also. There are others, I just can't remeber the names.

Brion

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Ed, I know that Kevin Cashen does, and I believe Raymond Rybar does also. There are others, I just can't remeber the names.

Brion

I only dabbled in it briefly with Ric Furrer, who is the guy most people go to these days, since Ric even teaches classes now in making it. Look for Ric Furrer, or Door County Forgeworks. I can't speak for Ray, but what I do the most of is making blommery steel from raw ore, I will be doing a smelt one week from today. The difference is that bloomery work starts with iron bearing rocks or sand, that I dig myself, that is ran through a charcoal fired smelter to produce steel or iron. Some people in ancient times would then seal this iron in a crucible with carbon bearing material and via extreme carburization achieve a true liquid steel. Bloomery never reaches the true liquidus but is more like sintered metal forge welded solid.

So just one ABS smith does this? Is this not the original damascus and the method that was lost?

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So just one ABS smith does this? Is this not the original damascus and the method that was lost?

You sound surprised by this revelation. The appropriate term today is wootz and yes it was the original damascus found in northern India and traded though the one of the most vibrant cities of trade in the east centuries ago. However, damascus that is pattern welded has been around longer. What was lost with wootz was the carbide patterning that appeared on the blade if things were done just right with the correct trace element of likely vanadium though other elements may have precipitated the same outcome. Wootz is hot short and difficult to forge. Pendray did some of the first successful attempts at replicating what is likely the process used in Northern India. Some researchers even believe that true wootz died out when the particular deposit of iron containing vanadium or other small amounts Mo or NB in small amounts was used up. Pendray once argued to me that the best wootz was possibly the steel that had such small carbide patterning that it was difficult to see. Anyway, what you see is banding of FeC3 carbides in a pearlite matrix. You can read the article on the tests done on some of the older wootz blades by going to http://tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeven-9809.html. Verhoven, Pendray Dauksh did the research and Verhoven has written other articles on the subject.

In order to forge the stuff out Pendray would encase the cake in a soft iron shell and then over hours slowly work it out to avoid having the cake braking into pieces under the hammer.

I am no expert at this but I did a thermite weld using niobium (a functional and maybe better substitute for vanadium) and enough carbon to get near the .8 C amount desired (too low a carbon content for wootz and the hypereutectoid banding). Wootz typically had about 1.5% carbon. I have only done this twice (the first was sent to me as a cake from a friend in Seattle) though I have been planning to do it again fairly soon. My first attempt at forging the first cake was somewhat disastrous. While the second cake appeared to show the banding, I believe I overheated the steel and banding disappeared (or I never really had the real stuff to begin with). Anyway the first and second cake had some of the same properties as a wootz cake. Using a screw press that would lightly impact the cake I thought I was making progress when I used too much force and the cake started breaking up. The only way to save it was to stack and weld it all back up. Out of roughly a five pound cake I ended up with only two medium sized knives. I still have a can full of the small fractured pieces. My second attempt was better using lots of heat cycles before I attempted to forge the cake slowly. Better - not great.

Where I am going with this is that producing wootz is not easy and my feeble attempts were just that "feeble". Producing a cake of steel without creating the wootz is a much simpler process though it also can be very challenging. Others have done it and I have just not spent enough time with it. While I know it is not easy, I also have much to learn.

Dan

A bladesmith named Jesus Hernandez has a video of him making crucible damascus. He discusses the loss of material in the video. It seems as it's an inevitable part of tbe process. He forges the bars he makes into a viking seax. I've had some email correspondence with him about the process. He seems to be a very nice and knowledgeable fellow.

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So just one ABS smith does this? Is this not the original damascus and the method that was lost?

I just finished Ric Furrer's 2013 Wootz class and it was quite enlightening. After firing the crucible charges I ended up with two wootz ingots of about 2 pounds each. I spent the next 2 days slowly and carefully forging one of the ingots into a bar, happily with no cracks! It did take an ungodly number of heats and hammer hits until the dendrites broke down enough that the metal actually began to visibly move under the hammer (finally!) on day 2... I should get several nice blades from that bar.

I'm now building a small furnace to try and replicate the process in my home shop.

Cheers,

Rob

I took Ric Furrer's class and have made 3 batches on my own, including from one meteorite fragments. All rather small as I used a lab muffle furnace I rebuilt from Ebay. I am not sure that woortz was ever really lost, and as Ric emphasizes, it's not magic metal. It's a decent steel but not as good as modern. Damn cool thru. Also made some shear steel from bone meal and wrought iron. There seems to be a fair number of people playing with the old stuff in the smithing and "living history" communities these days.

I'm not convinced on the Vanadium. There was none in the woortz I made when I ran some by ICP-MS. I wonder if what shut everything down was the British colonies and the presence of cheaper steel. Not enough of a metallurgist to understand how much you would need, but most folks making it use iron powder and cast iron or another carbon source. No one I am aware of has done the test of running pure iron, carbon and varying amounts of suspected metals (say 0-1% bw)

Mr. Cashen (who teaches a dang good class by the way - had the pleasure at NESM early this year. Highly recommend it as even an old dog like me learned a ton)is better able to address differences, etc. His smelting his own iron is where I want to go next. Not that we have native iron in Texas, but we do have cows to trade. But whether wootz makes a better knife, well, I think I'm coming of the opinion that skill, understanding of the metal properties and heat treatment, and proper design are more important than the metal and that most ancient smith would have sold their souls for what steels we work with. YMMV.

We do have a fellow, Marcus Young, who just joined the Material Science Department where I work part time, and he's worked with some modern "carbide-iron composites" which are awful cool. (nano-particle sized wootz from what I've seen) Be interesting to see what those do in a blade, if he will let me steal some or maybe I can convince him to try the ABS school and make one himself.

Kevin

Earlier this year I told my blacksmithing instructor I was interested in making crucible steel. He was interested because he had done something similar once before and was eager to try it again. Technically speaking I don't know if you could call what we made "crucible steel" because we didn't use a crucible, just a small clay furnace and a good bit of charcoal. It took the furnace about an hour to get to the right temperature. We cut up about half a coil of mild steel tie wire into into 6in. pieces and ran it through the furnace in about 6-7 charges. The reducing atmosphere in the furnace carburized the wire turning it into high carbon steel. The result was a decent sized bloom that shrank considerably when forged. The surface and texture of the final billet looked just like a piece of crude wrought iron, but when spark tested appeared to have a higher carbon content than 1084. I am in the process of finishing a blade from this piece of "wrought steel," as I like to call it. It has been successfully heat treated and is sitting on my bench waiting for a handle. I'll be sure to post it to the forum when it's done. When researching this project I found the following article very helpful: http://www.leesauder.com/pdfs/Aristotle%27s%20Steel.pdf .

~Joshua S.

Sounds more like what is know as "hearth steel" more than wootz.

I know Jeff Pringle has done a lot of experiments with wootz from ore in fact I watched him make a puck from limonite at fire and brimstone in 2012. Another wootz maker told me that you just need a strong carbide former to bind some of the excess carbon, vanadium being one that is common.