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The Outpost This forum is dedicated to all who share a love for, and a desire to make good knives, and have fun doing it. We represent a diverse group of smiths and knifemakers who bring numerous methods to their craft.

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Old 10-01-2001, 05:43 PM
Paul H
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Whuts Wootz?


One of those terms I've heard bandied about, but have yet to see a definition of. Perhaps I'm being lazy and could find it with some research? Figured you guys would have a better, more thorough definition.

TIA
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Old 10-01-2001, 06:01 PM
gthomas
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Hello Paul, There are several people on the forum that can answer this better than me, Achim for one (he actually makes wootz!) but I will give this a shot to help me understand it better also.

Wootz is the original Damascus steel. A wootz blade has a surface that shows a fine grained watering. Wootz is made by melting steel or (ironand carbon?) in a closed container with various alloying elements, (basically impurities). The resulting ingot has a fine crystaline stucture that is maintained in the blademaking process by forging at lower than normal temperatures. Higher temps will destroy the wootz structures giving you a normal steel.

Help Achim! I don't know as much about wootz as I thought. Is this correct?

Guy Thomas
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Old 10-02-2001, 12:19 AM
AchimW
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Wootz


Thanks, Guy.

Well, what you do in making wootz is actually first building a regular structure of segregations of impurities of either vanadium or molybdenum. This is done by cooling the liquid steel rather slowly thus building a structure of dendrites. The segregations (concentrations of the impurities) take place along the cooling lines of those dendrites. Next you destroy the dendrites leaving only the segregations by heating the bar at a high temperature for a longer time. Last thing to do is heat cycle and forge the bar touching the austenitic temperatur as a maximum in the heat cycle. During this heat cycling you build up a network or sheets of carbides growing along the segregations. In the end you have got a network of carbides layers surrounded by low carbon steel. This works like modern composite materials. Hard carbides give cutting ability and stability, soft carbon steel makes the whole structure tough as nails.

If you polish and etch such a piece of steel the carbon steel will get dark grey or black and the carbide layers will stay bright. The whole surface will show a fine and dense watering, much like a high density pattern welded steel. It can not be compared to pattern welded, though, because function and production are completely different.

Read this:

pub42.ezboard.com/fcustom...ID=5.topic

Achim
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