Where can I find "Wootz" steel?

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It might help if you fill out your profile so we know where you are. I'm guessing the Indian subcontinent or not too far away.

Wootz rounds and puddles can be purchased from many makers in India ( and some in Russia). They also sell them on ebay. There is no way to know what the quality is, .......and even if they are really wootz, turning one into a blade is a very skilled task.

Alternately, there are folks who make wootz blades and sell the "heat treated" and nearly finished blade. Again, quality varies, and most are not hardened much at all ( which is not uncommon for wootz). You can find these chaps online and in places like The Exchange. Getting a personal recommendation from someone you know who has used their steel would be helpful.
 
True wootz does not exist anymore. What is made today anywhere is at best an approximation of the original. The accuracy of this approximation may vary. The patterns on wootz blades is not caused due to any specific kind of welding but due to carbides that precipitate in the wavy pattern you see. These carbides existed in a naturally occurring ore found ranging from the Mysore area of South India all the way to Sri Lanka. One of theories of why the technique was lost was that ore was simply depleted.

Having said this, there are a few Lohar's (Smithies) in South and West India who make something close to wootz. I am unsure of the quality as my knowledge on this is largely theoretical. If you live in the US you might try looking at Richard Furrer's doorcountyforgeworks.com.
 
If you mean the actual billets of wootz steel made ten centuries ago.....yes, that stuff is gone.
If you mean true wootz steel.....many people and places make it.

The making of wootz ,however, continued in Europe and Russia,...and in India long after the first foundries closed up. The "cut an anvil in half", and "quench in the belly of a eunuch" legends and folklore are great fun, but the process and how/why it works are well understood today then then, and the wootz/bulat produced today is still wootz.

Dendritic growth of carbides of vanadium, tungsten, and chromium are the reason for the pattern.

Pattern welded steel - AKA Damascus - is not the same.....and is a very different animal.
 
ok, so i'll show my ignorance here. 2 questions, 1: is there any one reason it's so difficult to work or are you referring to the difficulty of turning a puddle of steel into a blade? and 2: why is it common for wootz to not be hardened?
 
bladsmth said:
If you mean the actual billets of wootz steel made ten centuries ago.....yes, that stuff is gone.
If you mean true wootz steel.....many people and places make it.

The making of wootz ,however, continued in Europe and Russia,...and in India long after the first foundries closed up. The "cut an anvil in half", and "quench in the belly of a eunuch" legends and folklore are great fun, but the process and how/why it works are well understood today then then, and the wootz/bulat produced today is still wootz.

Dendritic growth of carbides of vanadium, tungsten, and chromium are the reason for the pattern.

Pattern welded steel - AKA Damascus - is not the same.....and is a very different animal.
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So all steel with the dendritic micro-carbide segregation can be defined as Wootz?
There is the whole historical argument that only steel formed from the naturally occurring "Urukku" ore would be called Wootz steel. The Russian form is called Bulat and there are other names for other forms of this steel. Is that splitting hairs? All I have read on this is off the net and random stories some of the older smiths tell here. Could you recommend any better resources on the history of this steel and its present day existence and applications?

I am certain the legends of cutting through other swords and anvils are just that; legend. It was probably the best steel of the times. "Belly of a eunuch" indeed :D.

Here's a little abstract of some research done at the IIS Bangalore on this steel.
http://materials.iisc.ernet.in/~wootz/heritage/WOOTZ.htm
 
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Empirically, wootz doesn't exist if you define it as the steel made around 1000-1100 in India/Persia. If you use the definition more loosely, to include any identical steel, then the stuff made in other places and times is wootz,too. The source of the ores was the "secret" even though they didn't understand why. When the source was gone, so was the wootz. There are current online sellers who sell what they claim is Urukku ore.

I have read different opinions on whether the ore depleted, or better and faster metal production replaced the need for wootz.
 
In order to develop the structure of wootz it must be forged at low temperatures, 1625 f. probably the highest temperature in order to keep the structure from going back into solution. If they hardened it by soaking above critical, the pattern would disappear and the desired structure lost. Wootz was exceptionally tough, the blades would not break according to legend and what we know today about developing toughness in blades.

It does not take much of a blade to cut human flesh so great edge hardening was not as important at that time in battle, a broken blade was a very big deal as all the combatant would have left was a part of a blade or depending on design a handle.
 
Chris "Anagarika" guided me to the research of Dr. John Verhoeven on Wootz.
Makes for some interesting reading if you google it.
Significant perspective on Wootz etc. And btw they manage to replicate it quite accurately. The stuff on molecular and sub-molecular changes by presence of minute quantities of impurities is pretty cool.
 
Ed Fowler said:
It does not take much of a blade to cut human flesh so great edge hardening was not as important at that time in battle, a broken blade was a very big deal as all the combatant would have left was a part of a blade or depending on design a handle.
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This is implied in Dr.Verhoeven's papers too. Though he doesn't take a stand on the reason the production stopped, he does mention the possibility of Blacksmiths saving parts of the previous batches of ores to induce the same "impurities" in the new batches.
 
Anne Feurbach (sp?) presented a fascinating history of wootz going back to the biblical city of Merv which she was involved in an archaeological study of in which they found over half a million used wootz crucibles dating back far before India started making the stuff.

-Page
 
I think you can find real old wootz only in museums. I have made analysis of chemical composition of three "real antique wootz cakes no mill balls" from different e-bay sellers. In two times it were white cast iron, very dirty with sulfur (one of them contained 0.2% of sulfur), with high chromium content. One piece was hypereutectoid steel, also dirty and it was ABSOLUTELY not identical to real antique wootz, as in composition so in microstructure and surface pattern after forging.
I have some quantity of plain carbon steels (electric slag remelted) which gave surface pattern like these after forging.
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In spite of surface pattern my metal also is NOT wootz
 
This is a dead thread. You just necroposted a 6yr old thread
 
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