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3rd November 2020, 12:04 AM | #1 |
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Gas forges, compression using presses, electricity, other ways I do not know about.
Now try it with charcoal or coke and a hammer. |
3rd November 2020, 04:11 AM | #2 |
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Thanks for digging up those pics from Blade Magazine. Honestly that doesn't really look like a Widmanstätten pattern to me, but i suppose that might possibly be what happens when you hammer a thin layer on and the pattern distorts. I would expect more intersecting lines and angles though. This looks more like a fancy pamor manipulation. If you have any links to the actual article in the magazine i would love to read what they said about this beautiful blade.
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3rd November 2020, 01:54 PM | #3 | |
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David, here is a link to the kids website; http://www.burlywoodworks.com/ yes, a kid 17 years old. |
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3rd November 2020, 03:05 PM | #4 | |
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3rd November 2020, 07:22 PM | #5 |
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Mr. Ross, gas is indeed very easy to use, making damascus with gas is easier than baking a chocolate cake, but the big thing I don't like about it is that although it is great for welding, it is in my opinion less good for welding and , again for me, close to useless for heat treating.
With coke & charcoal you can control the heat in any part of the blade, so you can bring the edge of a blade to critical, and leave the back relatively soft. Effectively you can apply heat to a piece of work wherever you need it, and at whatever level you need, but with the gas forges I've used this is simply not possible, you get a fast, even, overall heat, no real control at all. I've never used bellows, even in Jawa I've used electric blowers. A cheap electric blower is a worn out vacuum cleaner on blow cycle. Tending the fire is what makes coke & charcoal so manageable, its talking to you the whole time. |
3rd November 2020, 09:03 PM | #6 | |
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3rd November 2020, 07:26 PM | #7 |
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here's the page from Blade Magazine October 2020
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3rd November 2020, 08:29 PM | #8 |
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The Empu Karja di Kromo forged five Kerisblades in 1904. The forging of these blades is described by Dr. Groneman. His articles are published in the Internationales Archiv fur Ethnographie in 1910 and 1913.
I made a replica of the first blade Karja di Kromo forged. I tried to make the pamor material just as it was executed by the kraton of Surakarta. I used Campo del Cielo meteoriet and adjusted the quantities a bit to approach the properties of the Prambanan meteorite. From each stage in the forging process I kept material samples. By modern spectrometric analyzing methods the meteorite could be detected from the beginning of the forging process till the completed blade and during all the stages. Below a picture with a part of the photo of the original keris published in the IAfE, showing the original pamor of Keris number I, forged by Karja di Krama and below that, the pamor in the replica forged by me. I think I am getting close. So these days it is possible to trace meteorite in Keris, probably as long as the quantities are not extremely low. (As example, Djeno Harumbrodjo mentioned, he used one gram of meteorite starting the forging of a Keris (on two kgs or more of iron and steel?). |
3rd November 2020, 08:55 PM | #9 |
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That is cool. Keep at it. Lots of meteor material available these days and not overly expensive. Love this stuff.
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3rd November 2020, 10:48 PM | #10 | |
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Regardless, my original point was that you will never find such a pattern in an Indonesian keris that could serve as proof of meteoric content. Though, of course, one should never say never when it comes to keris i have learned. |
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4th November 2020, 12:01 AM | #11 |
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Seerp, I think what David is looking for is that unique Widmanstätten pattern, and what I used to be looking for was concrete evidence that the contrasting material in a blade did indeed come from a meteor.
In your photos I can see contrasting material, but how do we know that this came from a meteor unless we saw it included in the forging when the material was still in the forge? That is problem. We cannot pick up something that we have no previous knowledge of and carry out any testing that will definitely confirm that the item contains meteor. During the 1980's and 1990's I made a lot of pamor and nickel damascus. I made pamor using several different types of nickelous material, including pure nickel and Arizona meteorite. I made a lot of damascus using pure nickel, and few pieces of damascus using meteorite. If you presented me with a mix of various pieces of pamor, polished, etched & stained, I doubt that I could tell what material had been used to create the pamor. If I had a piece of meteoritic material in my hand, that is pure meteorite, nothing else, that had been folded and welded 8 or 10 times, then polished, etched, stained, I could not tell if it was meteorite or not. If I use the traditional "touch test" on a blade that contains meteorite, I can detect a very tiny, almost imperceptible difference between the meteorite blade and a blade that has used commercial nickel, or some nickel alloy. But then this might just be my imagination, because the blades that I do this sort of test with are only blades that it might be expected could contain meteorite. The point is this:- we cannot confirm the presence of meteoritic material in a blade after that material has been through the forge welding process. Actually, I don't consider meteoritic material to be anything special, the cleaning process requires great care and a delicate touch if you wish the resultant billet to be pure meteorite, but once you get to using it as a component part of a blade it is no more nor less difficult than any other nickelous material, and when the blade is finished --- well, I've already commented on that. The photos are of a keris that I commissioned from a maker in Solo, I will not name him as he is a very private man and I do not have his permission to use his name, enough to say that I considered him to be very talented. He retired from keris work some years ago. This blade definitely does contain meteor. I made a billet of pure Arizona meteorite that I gave to this maker and it was used in this blade. This is the only keris that I know of that unquestionably contains meteoritic material. |
4th November 2020, 12:14 AM | #12 |
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Mr. Ross
Yeah, I've got a little WWI farriers forge with a hand blower, not much good for serious work, fire bed too shallow, cannot get it to welding heat, alright for little light work. The forge I used for blade work with coke had a 12" deep firebed, about 5" wide and 15" long. It was built in an old truck wheel and used a vacuum cleaner as the blower. Bottom blown. The sort of thing you are talking about I never got involved in, if I lit up the forge I had a specific job in mind, I never played with things, coke was too hard to get, and now is close to impossible to get. With charcoal I used a more shallow forge and much wider, side blown. You tend to use a lot more charcoal to get a job done than you do coke. Coal is OK for general work, but its filthy stuff and I dislike intensely using it. |
4th November 2020, 05:21 AM | #13 | |
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