Originally Posted by
Mike Blue
It does kind of look like wootz but is really alloy banding, or grain banding. I bet everyone honing with a microscope is going to go wild looking for this stuff on their blades now. ;)
Now you have to polish up the spine and see what you get there...(not like you needed more work to do). :)
I'd be curious to know if the makers of Red Imps could possibly have overlapped with the use of shear steels? Those can have a subtle lamination look to them. Another possibility would be the use of some Sheffield crucible steel because that could also produce some of this kind of crystalline appearance.