Damasteel?

[rick alen]

Sorry, never had anything in wootz, but if having one made Ferrur is certainly a good choice of maker.

 

[cutler81]

thanks

 

[GregF]

Knives made of damasteel can be very soft, but also can be very well made - hight quality... I had damasteel knives - one was much harder that the second one, it was even able to cut the softer one (as it was made of wood!). Similar situation when it comes to wootz - I am a huge fan of wootz knives and I have several dozens of wootz knives made by various smiths. There was a time I thought that wootz is just the best material and it guarantee the knife will be better than any other made of other steel. But not only material counts, smith's knowledge and experience too. It was basicly confirmed by the test I made with various wootz blades I have.
The results weren’t reliable, as every knife was different (size, blade shape). Those were my private knives: wootz blades (scandinavian, polish, russians) and Byelorussian wootz-like blade.

Now I am collecting a new “pack” for another test. This time blades will be identical, to make the test reliable in every way. I will use over a dozen identical knives: made of wootz and the best powder steels.
I can’t wait to see how wootz blades will compare with powder steels!

 

[cutler81]

very interesting... waiting for test results!

 

[charlesquik]

Damascus steel is just the principle of folding the metal multiple time to make a pattern.

You can make damascus steel with low carbon metal as well as high carbon metal.

From what I understand, the steel folding principle was used because they had not the technology back in the day to melt the iron/steel hot enough. So the result had a lot of impurity and so the process of folding would remove the impurity from the steel.


Here is a nice video explaining it.

[video=youtube;LLqZdfcVoV8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLqZdfcVoV8[/video]