wootz bowie

H

hammerfall

Joined
Oct 2, 2010
Messages
221
since the economy going bad arround the world, too much free time i had. so i made some wootz to play with. the ingot is smelted by vaccum induction resmelting furance. forged, mechined and heat treated to form the carbid banding structure and desired pattern. then the blade went through polishing,etching and mount up handles and guards such...

i think its pretty close to the antique wootz blade appearence. not sure how it fair on the performance compare to the antique. all my knowledge about medieval wootz preformance are from legends. well i had a 18th century wootz tulwar, but its a $5000 antique. i am not that rich of a china man to ruin an antique for a destructive test yet. i had tested the knife on cutting some falling silk. my cutting skill is crab, 1 success cut out of 15 tries.

well, the blade length is 26cm, about 10 inches. 6mm thick(about 1/4 inch). hardness is about hrc55.

base structure is low bainite and matensite, it mixed with banded carbide. here are the pictures of the knife:
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Very cool knife, hammerfall. Great looking steel, and nice fittings and handle work to. I like it.
 
I certainly feel you got excellent results on the looks and in the cutting trial. Very well done !!!!! Frank
 
thanks everyone. it took me several weeks to finally learn how to work with the wootz.

also welcome any critics, like how to improve the pattern and such. for example, how do you make "ladder" shows clearer.
 
Love the look of the knife, but for me the real eye catcher after the blade, is the file work just behind the guard. :thumbup:
 
Very nice Hammerfall!
If you don't get the wootz input you need, maybe you could show it over at the Bloomers and Buttons site.
 
That's a marvellous piece of steel. One day I'll work up the courage to buy a piece of wootz and make something out of it (smelting my own isn't in the plans anytime soon)
 
this is the most important thing i learnt from making this blade:

write down EVERY thing you going through when you do the smelting, forging and heat treats such as temperature, time, and rate of deformation... it helps a lot when things going complicate, you may review what you did step by step and figure out which parts is more likely went wrong. which part need to be improved such.
 
Wow, beautiful! Any more detail on smelting the wootz? You have an induction smelter? :eek:

The blade is the first thing you notice, but the guard and the guard spacer is also very nice.
 
lazlo said:
Wow, beautiful! Any more detail on smelting the wootz? You have an induction smelter? :eek:

The blade is the first thing you notice, but the guard and the guard spacer is also very nice.
Click to expand...

i used laboratory's equpitment. 40kg load went in VIR furance, and come out of 33kg useful ingots. it is forged and hot rolled into 7 of 1000 x 100 x 10 bars. from there they were then cutted and forged into knives and swords.

i did not followed the "very slow cool at molten states" suggestion in many reference. acctrully i avoided the slow cool by lower the degree of under cooling no more than 20°C during the ingots cast.

dispite many info stated that wootz being difficult to forge. i found its no harder than other high carbon steel such like 1095. also forging at low temperature(900~700°C）is not necessary. i reduced S to 0.003%, P is reduced to under 0.006%, thus it has very little hot brittlness. in my tests, 3 of 6kg ingots, and one 40kg ingot were forged and rolled between 1100~850°C, all of them are successfully done.

after forge and rolled them into bars, then you can do whatever you want to change the pattern. pattern control is just like welded damascus, a little bit different but similar enough.
 
Perhaps you can give me a helping hand. I bought a wootz blade in the for sale. It is less than 1/8" thick. It is so soft I'm sure I can bend it into an arc with just my fingers. Does that sound as it should be in your opinion? Frank
 
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