When in India "died" wootz?

[Ibrahiim al Balooshi]

Originally Posted by Jim McDougall

Ibrahiim, thank you for that outstanding synopsis bringing the essential theme topic back into the discussion. It has been an amazing discussion bringing together the many facets of this industry and the mysterious watered steel so sought after. It is amazing that even into our times there is research continuing.

I think that the focus on the Russian scientific and craftsmanship factors is most interesting and most likely the case because of the notable instances which pertain to the rediscovery of much of the wootz mystery. While obviously there are a good number of other areas involved, the work by Anosov in the research angles is of course key.

As with most industry and craftsmanship, there are likely to be many levels and degrees of quality and production. It is extremely interesting to see these pointed out in the observations and illustrations that continue being presented here.
Thank you!

Salaams Jim. Thank you ...this has become one of the leading information sites with fine input from all and from my viewpoint purely as an observer I have learned volumes from its content. ...I discovered a great website with superb references at;

http://www.geostudio.pl/wordpress/?p=830

And a brilliant paper at file:///C:/Users/LENOVO/Downloads/102-103-1-PB%20(1).pdf

May I add...and this is not a complaint !! The thread comes in at master class level and leaves a lot of potential students somewhat in its wake...I therefor add a brief note on the background so that members can quickly get up to flying speed on this subject. Here is the rendition from Wikepedia which sets down some basic principles and groundwork viz;

Quote"Bulat is a type of steel alloy known in Russia from medieval times; regularly being mentioned in Russian legends as the material of choice for cold steel. The name булат is a Russian transliteration of the Persian word fulad, meaning steel. This type of steel was used by the armies of the nomadic people who were struggling to develop their smithing techniques. Bulat steel was the main type of steel used for swords in the armies of Genghis Khan, the great emperor of the Mongolian Empire. The technique used in making wootz steel has been lost for centuries and the bulat steel used today makes use of a more recently developed technique.

Contents
1 History
2 Structure
3 Bibliography
4 See also
History
The secret of bulat manufacturing was lost by the beginning of the 19th century. Pavel Anosov eventually managed to duplicate the qualities of that metal in 1838, when he completed ten years of study into the nature of Damascus steel swords. Bulat became popular in cannon manufacturing, until the Bessemer process was able to make the same quality steels for far less money.

Anosov had entered the Saint Petersburg Mine Cadet School in 1810, where a Damascus steel sword was stored in a display case. He became enchanted with the sword, and was filled with stories of them slashing through their European counterparts. In November 1817 he was sent to the factories of Zlatoust mining region in the southern Urals, where he was soon promoted to the inspector of the "weapon decoration department".

Here he again came into contact with Damascus steel of European origin (which was in fact pattern welded steel, and not at all similar), but quickly found that this steel was quite inferior to the original from the Middle East.

Anosov had been working with various quenching techniques, and decided to attempt to duplicate Damascus steel with quenching. He eventually developed a methodology that greatly increased the hardness of his steels.

Structure
Carbon steel consists of two components: pure iron, in the form of ferrite, and cementite or iron carbide, a compound of iron and carbon. Cementite is very hard and brittle; its hardness is about 640 by the Brinell hardness test, whereas ferrite is only 200. The amount of the carbon and the cooling regimen determine the crystalline and chemical composition of the final steel. In bulat, the slow cooling process allowed the cementite to precipitate as micro particles in between ferrite crystals and arrange in random patterns. The color of the carbide is dark while steel is grey. This mixture is what leads to the famous patterning of Damascus steel.

Cementite is essentially a ceramic, which accounts for the sharpness of the Damascus (and bulat) steel. Cementite is unstable and breaks down between 600–1100 °C into ferrite and carbon, so working the hot metal must be done very carefully.

Bibliography;
The Mystery of Damascus Blades, by John D. Verhoeven in Scientific American, No 1, pages 74–79, 2001.
History of Metallography: The Development of Ideas on the Structure of Metals before 1890. Cyril S. Smith. MIT Press, 1988.
On Damascus Steel. Leo S. Figiel. Atlantis Arts Press, 1991.
Archaeotechnology: The Key Role of Impurities in Ancient Damascus Steel Blades. J. D. Verhoeven, A. H. Pendray and W. E. Dauksch in
JOM: A Publication of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, Vol. 50, No. 9, pages 58–64; September 1998. Available at http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM...even-9809.html "Unquote.

Regards,
Ibrahiim al Balooshi.

[estcrh]

This shows that an ingot of crucible made in the proper manner had the necessary ingredients to forge a watered steel blade but Ann Feuerbach in "Crucible Damascus Steel: A Fascination for Almost 2,000 Years" says that not all ingots would necessarily produce a pattern.




Pattern formation in wootz damascus steel swords and blades - John Verhoeven

[Emanuel]

Cool thanks Eric.

Greg Obach followed this same process, producing a low-carbon rim around the high-carbon centre.

Metallurgy rocks!!!

[estcrh]

I have read several theories about how physical manipulation of the steel during the forging process such as cutting grooves in a crucible steel blade blank was the method used to create certain damascus patterns.

Pattern formation in wootz damascus steel swords and blades - John Verhoeven

[ariel]

Originally Posted by Ibrahiim al Balooshi

Here is the rendition from Wikepedia which sets down some basic principles and groundwork viz;

Quote: Bulat steel was the main type of steel used for swords in the armies of Genghis Khan, the great emperor of the Mongolian Empire. The technique used in making wootz steel has been lost for centuries and the bulat steel used today makes use of a more recently developed technique.

Bulat became popular in cannon manufacturing, until the Bessemer process was able to make the same quality steels for far less money.


Anosov.... eventually developed a methodology that greatly increased the hardness of his steels.


Regards,
Ibrahiim al Balooshi.

Ibrahiim,
This blurb from Wiki contains so many silly errors that I am sorely tempted not to use Wiki again even for a question whether tigers are vegetarians :-))))

Mongols of 13th century had no wootz ( bulat)

Nobody, EVER made barrels of firearms from wootz.

Anosov's bulat process did not depend on quenching. He did not increase hardness of bulat: all "bulats" ( wootz) have Rockwell C hardness in the range between 20 and 35.

[Ibrahiim al Balooshi]

Originally Posted by ariel

Ibrahiim,
This blurb from Wiki contains so many silly errors that I am sorely tempted not to use Wiki again even for a question whether tigers are vegetarians :-))))

Mongols of 13th century had no wootz ( bulat)

Nobody, EVER made barrels of firearms from wootz.

Anosov's bulat process did not depend on quenching. He did not increase hardness of bulat: all "bulats" ( wootz) have Rockwell C hardness in the range between 20 and 35.

Salaams Ariel, I am late in answering since it has taken me a while to try to discover the Barrel Making techniques particularly in Persian gun making...but in fact these are virtually unrecorded. I note the following which is interesting as it supports the almost unknown nature of this technique ... from ...

http://www.iranicaonline.org/article...on-and-muskets

Quote" Despite the availability of a technical text such as this, the chancellor of Shah Solṭān Ḥosayn (1105-35 /1694-1722) sent a letter to Louis XIV of France requesting several makers of cannons and other firearms (Qāʾem-maqāmī, p. 114). During the reign of Nāder Shah (1148-60/1736-47), material and craftsman for gun-making were also summoned to Marv in preparation for a campaign in Central Asia (Marvī, pp. 911-12), but no technical information about this is available.

In the Qajar period new techniques of cannon making were introduced from Europe by Prince ʿAbbās Mīrzā. The core mold was no longer employed, and the cannon barrel was bored with a boring mill constructed according to European models. The improvement in technical performance was remarkable. If a cannon during Nāder Shah’s campaign against the Afghans needed 20 to 30 persons to be loaded and fired and 100 to be carried, the new ones needed only 4 to 5 persons and 4 horses (Donbolī, pp. 133-34). In this period some books on artillery were translated from European languages into Persian (Afšār, pp. 90-91), but they contained little or no information about cannon making (e.g., Māzandarānī).

Musket making. The best description of musket-making is found in the travel account of Jean Chardin (q.v.), who visited Persia in the second half of the 17th century. Persian muskets, according to him, were all match-locks (Chardin III, p. 558), as at the end of the 16th century when 300 musketeers from Isfahan ignited their matches before attacking the Uzbeks (Eskandar Beg, p. 466). According to Chardin, the barrels of these muskets were heavy, thick, and damascened." Unquote.

Perhaps, therefor, it is not a matter of these barrels never existing but more associated with the fact that no record was ever allowed / made recording the secretive method... It does seem however that in some cases where damascening took place on hand held guns that this was as a decorative technique rather than actual gun barrel manufacture.

The following is noted from

http://firearmshistory.blogspot.com/...welded-or.html

Quote"... wootz steel (the steel used in the so-called "damascus blades") was NOT used to make damascus barrels very much.

William Greener in his Gunnery in 1858: Being a Treatise on Rifles, Cannon and Sporting Arms writes that these barrels are rare and on examination of the available barrels made by wootz steel workers, most were actually were made of commonest iron with a very thin plate of wootz steel around them, indicating that the wootz steel ore was becoming very valuable, since the mine in India where the ore came from was running out. Instead of using wootz steel, the more common option was to use pattern welded steel and the reason that they were called damascus barrels is because the patterns on the pattern welded steel resembled that made from wootz steel. So the name "damascus" is a misnomer and when we say "damascus barrels", we really mean "pattern welded barrels". In pattern welding, two or more metals are used to make the barrel (usually iron and steel bars, or steel bars of varying carbon content)."Unquote.

I therefor suggest that before this period of dwindling supplies of Wootz ore...that Cannon Barrels may have been attempted and that the technique was lost but that the secondary reason ...that of the time problem...when the raw ingredients ran out may be masking the fact that wootz may have been used in Barrel Making previously...but we just cannot see it.

Regards,
Ibrahiim al Balooshi.

[ariel]

I have yet to see a single barrel made out of wootz. Plenty of acid-etched damascening, plenty of pattern-welded ones, but not wootz.

Barrels were either cast whole, or made out of spiral billets welded together.


The former is obviously impractical taking into account small size of crucibles and the requirement for slow cooling to allow formation of the dendrites.


As to the latter, perhaps the strongest argument against it is the purely ceremonial nature of the so-called " chevron" blades, with segments of wootz welded to segments of plain or pattern-welded steel. There are always cracks in the welds, making the blade unusable for fighting. But if the same technique is used for a barrel, the gases will tear the whole structure apart. This, BTW, is the main reason why modern barrels are not using spiral welds any more, and just drill a hole in a long steel cylinder.

[Jim McDougall]

I wonder if it is just me, or does it not seem the majority of the issues at hand have to do with trying to agree of terms used for certain types or forms of crucible steel. The semantics and transliterations as well as obvious misperceptions in accounts, records and many sources seem to have the characteristic disparities resultant from varying perspectives of the observers and their own vocabularies.

[Ibrahiim al Balooshi]

Originally Posted by Jim McDougall

I wonder if it is just me, or does it not seem the majority of the issues at hand have to do with trying to agree of terms used for certain types or forms of crucible steel. The semantics and transliterations as well as obvious misperceptions in accounts, records and many sources seem to have the characteristic disparities resultant from varying perspectives of the observers and their own vocabularies.

Salaams Jim, Yes indeed it appears so. Rather like trying to make cannon barrels from Wootz...the entire thing shatters...!! when what we need is basic agreement on the foundations of the discussion...support, teamwork and the ability to see the other point of view. I find some people in this area of Forum business on far too short a fuse... causing detonation, disagreement and the worst case scenario of a breach explosion, or the round stuck in the breach!! A little less gunpowder and maybe some oil in the barrel?

Regards,
Ibrahiim al Balooshi

[Jim McDougall]

Excellent analogy Ibrahiim!!!
Basically as I struggled through sources and data in my accelerated crash course regarding the age old mysteries of wootz to try to get at least somewhere near the knowledge of these guys on the subject...it does seem that I did find some references to there being variations in the process which were tendered toward gun barrel making.

I cannot yet be sure, but it may have been Verhoeven or one of the other noted treatises on the making of 'wootz'. I have not yet looked at the Elgood book on Muslim firearms, but that would seem likely to have some references.

From what I have understood, and learned thus far in this foray into the formidable world of metallurgy and steel 'exotica', there are so many misconceptions swirling about with the terminology used that it is easy to see how there is so much disparity in discussing it.
In the general world, there is often virtually no understanding of what wootz really is, and so often the word Damascus describing 'watered steel' is so broadly applied it is beyond rational attempts to resolve into correct terms.

I do admire those who do have a true understanding of these complicated matters, particularly those who have the patience to attempt explanation to novices at it like myself, and for others who are rather caught up in the apparent semantics and misnomers often perpetuated in some of the literature, yet are willing to work at realigning such details.

I suppose 'patience' is the key word

[Richard Furrer]

Originally Posted by ariel

I have yet to see a single barrel made out of wootz. Plenty of acid-etched damascening, plenty of pattern-welded ones, but not wootz.

Barrels were either cast whole, or made out of spiral billets welded together.


The former is obviously impractical taking into account small size of crucibles and the requirement for slow cooling to allow formation of the dendrites.


As to the latter, perhaps the strongest argument against it is the purely ceremonial nature of the so-called " chevron" blades, with segments of wootz welded to segments of plain or pattern-welded steel. There are always cracks in the welds, making the blade unusable for fighting. But if the same technique is used for a barrel, the gases will tear the whole structure apart. This, BTW, is the main reason why modern barrels are not using spiral welds any more, and just drill a hole in a long steel cylinder.

I have not tested any old chevron welded blades, but have made a few Ariel (web search my name "furrer" and chevron for photo of one blade from 1999) and they bend 90 degrees without breaking (have photos somewhere of that above blade doing so). I made a few to see if they were actually practical...I would say they were...flaws and all.

I too have not seen wootz barrels, but I did see and Dr. Figiel has in his book chevron welded gun barrels... one may call that pattern "multiple chevron" as it zig-zags more than one slow chevron.
As per Dr. Alan Williams' research there are armor pieces which have wootz welded to common bloomery iron as a laminated material. One could suggest that such was done with barrels, but again I have not seen one.


Ric