It is interesting to note that pretty much every culture that used the
bloomery process of making wrought iron from ore seems to have come up with
pattern welding at some point. Perhaps the stacking and forge welding of
muck bar into merchant bar and then merchant bar into singly refined wrought
iron, usw, provided an easy springboard to piling and then to pattern
welding.
Thomas Powers
> Don't forget that there were also pattern-welded swords outside Europe and
> western Asia. The "wood-grain" effect on some Indonesian blades was
> achieved by laminating plain carbon steel (or iron) plates with plates of
> nickel-iron alloys, folding multiple times, then forging to shape,
> grinding, polishing and etching with acid fruit juices that darkened the
> plain carbon steel layers. The nickel-iron alloy came from the smelting
> of laterites that developed by the weathering of ultrabasic rocks (dunites
> and peridotites) that are usually ophiolite complexes (slabs of upper
> mantle that that been thrust up to the surface). There are large
> exposures of nickel- bearing laterites in Indonesia and the Phillipines,
> and these are assumed to have been smelted by bloomery processes to
> produce the iron-nickel alloys used in these blades, of which the kris
> (keris) is the best known.
>
>
> Daniel Tokar wrote:
>> Hello:
>> I am metalsmith and forge patternwelded steel. 32 years of making things
>> using all types of metal.
>> You need to narrow your question. 40 generations of smiths in thousands
>> of locations will not be using the same material or methods. Everything
>> makes a difference, ore , flux , fuel, working methods. I can start with
>> the same raw iron and end with very different results .
>> Main reason you don't find swords made from homemade iron is the cost. A
>> good patternwelded sword takes about 100 hours work to make {not using
>> modern tools}, digging ore , making charcoal, running the bloomery,
>> refining the raw iron, you can more than double that time. People like
>> original methods, they just don't like paying for them.
>> I am in the Eastern part of the U.S. , so anything made here is unlikely
>> to match up with ores in Europe. Learning to forge would help you to
>> understand the variables.
>> Good Luck
>> Daniel Tokar
Thomas Powers
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