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Hello Everyone, I wanted to quickly share a free tool that I programmed for calculating feed materials for wootz/crucible steel. This calculator makes it extremely easy to play around with different ingredients in your melts and get to your final recipe faster. The calculator does require an email and password, nothing too serious but this is only so you can easily save and track your feed materials and melts. First there is an explanation of all the functions and how to use the calculator. Next is all of your saved recipes. Here is a screenshot of my current recipes. After that will be all of your feed materials which can be added to the exact specifications of your material. Then comes the fun part.... The calculator section. In this section there is a drop down for easily adding any of your feed materials that you added to the section above. The target carbon percentage is used to automatically calculate how much of your carbon source you should add. When you click calculate, it will auto-increment the carbon source weight by .01 grams until your desired total carbon percentage is reached. Finally, once you hit calculate, the expected results of the ingot will be printed out along with the amount of your carbon source material that you will need to add to hit your target carbon percentage. Here is the link to the calculator https://www.wootzsmithforum.com/wootz-calculator/ , Enjoy!!

This is a small "herb chopper" I made recently from one of my recent ingots. 1.6% C with a lamellar water pattern. Bog oak and titanium pants.

Hello all, Long time lurker, first time posting! I wanted to share with you the first blade that I forged from some crucible steel. I first found wootz about 8 months ago and instantly fell in love with the watered pattern, I had to make a knife. I watched tons of youtube videos, read research articles until my brain went numb and got lost on sketchy Russian/Ukrainian websites searching for bulat with google translate. In the end I followed pretty closely to what is outlined in the Verhoeven and Pendray research articles about wootz. However, I pulled significant amounts of information from the people of this forum and youtube videos posted by Niels Provos, Richard Furrer, and I know there was at least one more person but I cant think of it atm... Well enough of that, here are some pictures! According to the calculations, should be about 1.5% C. I used powdered mild steel bought online, cast iron from old plumbing pipes and bits of O1 tool steel for Vanadium and Chromium. I know you only need one but I got both . The wootz cake was a little over 2 kg Wootz Cake This is about my 12th wootz cake. All of the others were done with a charcoal fire and either fell apart when forging (Initially I was shooting for 1.8%C and then found out that much carbon in steel makes it a pain to forge!!!!) or had air bubbles.... This particular wootz cake was done in a propane furnace that I built. It has dendritic patterns on the surface but they were quite small. I ran the furnace up to temp then backed off a bit and finally killed the burner and sealed the furnace. Seems to of gotten a bit of annealing from the extra long cool down. Cut the cake in half and broke the center to show grain structure. Forging out the bar. The final bar was almost 2 feet long and I still have the other half of the cake left! Blade cut out of the finished bar and lightly etched Other side And here is the blade!! I have plans for a brass and maple burl handle And here is a close-up of the pattern. I feel that I got a pretty nice watered steel out of this! I only used about 6 inches of the bar for this knife. A lot of the people on this forum have publicly posted wootz content and I want to say thank you!

This weekend, a friend and I attempted to produce crucible steel for the first time. It's something we've both been keen to try for a while so a couple weeks back we decided we'd put a plan together. We were confident we could build the foundry but I wasn't sure my forge burner would be able to produce the heat required. We both have the same burner and they're sort of modular and could be easily transferred from a forge to a foundry so we figured why not use two burners and see how that goes. We set out expectations at a realistic level and decided that this attempt would be to see if we could even melt steel. We filled our crucible with cast iron (donated from resurfaced brake rotors) and small pieces of mild steel to bring the iron ratio up. The cast iron content was an unknown but we worked on the assumption of 2% carbon, aiming for a final level of 1.3%, though it could end up higher. Total mass was 600g. Green glass was put on top. Once it went in we were both surprised how quickly the glass melted. The crucible stayed in the foundry for a little over an hour before we killed the fuel supply and dropped in a little Aluminium. We left it sitting in the foundry for a few more minutes the took it out to cool. An hour later the glass was cracked open and little puck fell out. It looked a little porous too it untrained eyes but we were still really happy we had seemingly pulled it off. High-fives were had. I cut it in half to reveal what looked like a mostly solid puck but a quick polish and etch revealed that there were a couple pieces of unmelted mild steel in the bottom. Despite that we were pretty pleased with ourselves. So we attempted melt number two. This didn't go nearly as well. Melt #2 was 900g of small bits from oroshigane smelts. After 80-minutes only the glass had melted. Here's what I think happened: The first run had depleted our gas bottles somewhat so at the second run our 9kg gas bottles were low and quickly freezing, dropping gas pressure and heat. Essentially we just weren't as hot the second time around. That, and powdered cast iron probably melts a lot easier than chunks of carbon steel. So in the end we determined we need a hotter fire source. LPG is expensive and will always have the freezing issue so well be exploring a waste oil burner for future attempts. When we've established a system that will reliably melt steel we'll begin looking closer at our recipes. All in all, we're pretty happy with the mornings work. All feedback welcome A.J. Prime *Edit* Photo seem to have published in the wrong order

For many years now I was business partners with Peter Swarz-Burt and watched him making wootz . I learned a ton from him over the years. Well Peter left the shop last June,moved to HI infact. After peter left I got an order for a wootz knife . There were a few bars laying around I could use so I took the job.. the bars failed .. so I began my dissent into wootz making . This is the first piece completed from My wootz

Hello fellows, Here I will record my efforts to create my first sword. This project started about two years ago when I managed to get a hold of a rather big piece of wootz made by Peter Swarz-Burt of Dragon's Breath Forge in Connecticut. Fun story, as I was in talks with Peter over email to buy some wootz he suddenly dissapeared to Hawaii, so I had to wait for the wootz a bit longer. A few months later I was watching the first season of Forged in Fire and I though "Hey that name looks familiar...". It was Peter!! [spolier] He won, and happily proclaimed that he was gonna take his wife to Hawaii for the price money! Really cool to see these amazing smiths compete in their craft. Don't worry about the extra wait Peter, it only took me two years to gather the courage to forge the wootz! No stress! I'm a very mediocre smith, kind of a newbie accually. So I wanted a simple shape. First I wanted to do a single edged viking, Norwegian style, but changed it to a proper double edged sword with almost parallell edges and a rounded tip. Slap on a very Norwegian type H hilt and call it a day. Part I: Making guard and pommel I made these parts almost two years ago and only recorded the progress using a crappy old iPhone 3 camera, so please excuse this poor attempt at photography. The guard and pommel is made from a big chunk of cast grey iron. I shaped it with simple tools; hacksaw and files. I did the rough cut with a bandsaw at my work. Slowly the shape gets closer and closer. This material is quite easy to file and saw because the graphite in it lubricates, so that helps, but the massive size is something new to me. Pommel and guard are shaped and boiled in concentrated lemon juice for 20 min to reveal the fantastic texture of grey iron. Grey iron is cast iron with enough carbon to have graphite crystals in the structure (3-4% carbon). But the pommel needs some bling bling and brass is flash! I did copper inlays by filing with a needle file with lenticular cross section and then cutting in overhangs with knife and hammer. Hammer in copper like so. Sorry about the photo. Finished pommel. But i dipped it in ferric chloride and I don't like the surface. I'm gonna re-polish the surface and do a new finish by boiling in lemon juice, like the picture above. Next up will be forging the blade of wootz and rough shaping with angle grinder. I need to edit and select some photos first. Cheers!

Hello All! It has been quite a few years since I have been involved in the Wootz community. Not due to lack of interest, but due to health and not having an area to work. From glancing around the pages, it seems that there has been quite a lot of experimentation from all over the world, with some very nice looking results. I am gearing up to do a lecture and demonstration over here in Australia for the guild on Wootz production, and was thinking I would like to take the pulse, so to speak, of Wootz making around the world. If you all don't mind could we: 1. Make a list Wootz makers in the US and internationally (will all wootz makers put their hands up please...LOL) (please link to a website if you have one) This is ONLY those who smelt their own wootz and make knives from them. 2. Make a simple survey of the current methods of smelting, ingredients, and forging of wootz (times and temperatures etc) Please try to keep things as simple and as short as possible. Also please try to not post a name or method that has already been listed. I hope this will be of help to the whole wootz making community and is something that it would be good to regularly update. Happy forging, Tim.

Hello everyone. I am about to make a first attempt at Wootz/pulad/bulat...ect, and I am curious as to what type of cast iron I should be looking for. Mainly the tech specs for the silicon in it. I know that C should be between 3-5 wt% but the Si content is something I have no Idea about. The lowest I have found (looking around so some to buy online still) so far is between 1.8-2.25 wt%, which seems very high to me. Any suggestions on where to buy it from or what type specifically (like gray 40) would be great. issue i am having is the small order that i would need. Think their could be a foundry somewhere near me that I could call as well. Anyway thanks in advance Chris

Pishqabz 311mm Blade: 188/38mm 5,5/3mm Wootz. Handle: Moosehorn, Brass, Mosaic pins, Moonstone, Padouk. One way how to attach the handle to the blade. Fit parts and fill with epoxy. Janne Kruunari Finlad

Hello All, I will be doing a wootz making and forging demo at Tunnel Mill near Rochester, MN later this month. http://tunnelmillcrafts.com/Calendar/Calendar.htm Should be a good time over several days should you have the time. I heard they have a 500 weight Little Giant on hand...I intend to see her eat...so there may be a large pattern-welding session some night as well if they let me. Yours, Ric

The following knife is an experiment of sorts. It's the first blade I have forged from our Wootz-ish crucible steel (~1.7%C?) and meant to resemble a small seax. The ring-and-dot motif on bone is reminiscent of Viking-age bone decoration, although the motif is much older and common to many different cultures. The bolster is a simple copper plate that I drifted to the shape of the tang. The handle is scavenged ironwood from a flooring job. Unfortunately, I messed up the heat treat on the knife. Tempering at 500F for an hour left the blade very brittle and not suited for anything but kitchen duty. I wonder what a proper tempering temperature for Wootz-ish knife might be. For the next one, I will try 800F and see how that goes. I would also like some suggestions on handle decoration. For my taste it is too unadorned, but the ironwood is very hard and brittle. I had a hard time chiseling out even the tang. Blade Length: 7 1/4in Blade Width: 1 5/8in Handle Length: 6 7/8in Let me know what you think, Niels.

Photos of this weeks class We prepared the raw material Monday and then made six ingots Tuesday. Today they forged the ingots....maybe I should have had more than one anvil for them to use? Ric

so since I am on holiday I started a redo on my wootzsmelter, after working in the garden. It is my old smelter, made from an 11kg gasbottle, following a design I got from Achim Wirtz here in Germany it was a bit "nifty" as Niko once said, very narrow for an A1 crucible, so I want it to be bigger in the "heatroom" which should give me less trouble with the heat for the melts for that I took out some of the casting - had to hammer it out with some effort - finding that I made the walling very thick, some pieces where thicker than three - four centimeters out came over 11kg, much more than I thought the wool is still in good shape, so that can stay, the bottom is still ok and the pipe gives a tangential flame to the bottom of the crucible, there is anough space to use some stands, too I found an old bottle that will make for the inside, it is big enough to give the space for my crucibles (Achim said: a double-magnum redwine bottle will do the trick, too) more in the next days