Thread: could this be a real damacus straight?

Have you tested the hardness of the new Wootz against old Wootz steel?

I have personally done so, and I know Dr. Verhoeven and Pendray have, as has Ric and several others who have had access to old samples and new made wootz.

Wootz will achieve very good hardness, upward of Rc 65 on sampling that I did. That's not very much fun to sharpen at that hardness and it is also a typical steel in that it will be brittle at that hardness as well. It is such a very simple steel with mostly iron and carbon and minimal additional alloying elements. The crucible method and the slow cooling during processing are what make it the steel it is due to the carbide crystalline structures that form. There is no inherent advantage to the hardness alone.

From the CATRAL testing done several years ago in the UK, wootz outperformed several modern tool steels (52100) as a cutting material in a soft pearlitic state with as-forged carbides in that pearlite matrix. In the hardened state, it was about as good as the modern tool steels. Since then, there are several new alloys that will outperform even good old 52100 regularly.

Frankly it's much easier to make large amounts of modern tool steels and the economy of scale to produce a steel that's as good as wootz will generally win. There are a few of us who will take the time and waste money to produce archaic forms of material for the interest alone. I wish it was commercially viable. The only company I know that took the time was Roselli in Europe and they probably made a lifetime supply for their knifeworks in one batch.

Oh clearly this is not a good material for razors, softer is better for that. Woots was always at its best when used in swords and large daggers. And since we're pretty much past that stage in the arms race, we're not going to have any use for a large scale Woots production. But wouldn't I LOVE a replica sword just the same

@tofagerl - I edited your post to make it a little less "enthusiastic" :-)

I have a Chandler Wootz razor and, high hardness and aside, I can tell you that the Wootz takes a great edge.

Sorry, sometimes my fingers are faster than my brain.

Is it Wootz, though, or just pattern welded? Because the chandlers I GIS'd look like pattern welded. Of course, the resolution was very low on almost all of them.

The Chandler wootz blades are billets from Alfred Pendray's shop. I forged and heat treated all of those. But some of Joe's razors are pattern-welded blades and I'm intimately familiar with the ones that came out of my forge.

Originally Posted by tofagerl

Is it Wootz, though, or just pattern welded?

The razor I have is made with the Pendray Wootz that Mike describes in his post.

Once I get the money, you'll make one for me