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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!