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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!!

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!

Dear all After meeting on this forum, Niko and i had a lot of conversation. we ended up with the crazy idea to organise a masterclass with both tatara and curcible steel making at my workshop in Hoboken, Antwerp, Belgium. So here it is, the masterclass will be organised in september 2015. Anyone who is interested in coming over please contact me at klaasremmen(@)gmail.com. We plan to work with 10 participants, more information in the flyer as attachment. Kind regards Klaas Historical metallurgy masterclass.pdf

We just finished our first attempt at creating crucible steel using a propane fired furnace. To test the furnace, we melted wrought iron, a little bit of O1 and charcoal. The crucible was not sealed so that we could watch it as the charge started melting. Here are some photos from our first "successful" run: Here is a picture of the setup: 5psi of propane on a 1/4in hose connected to a 1 1/2 diameter nozzle with a big blower. 3in of ceramic fiber blanket and 1in of concrete as insulation. The reactive crucible as everything was molten: Here is a temperature time graph - not that useful as we had to change bottles in between: I measured 3110F as maximum temperature; so next time, we can run with a little bit less pressure. And here some pictures of the bubbly ingot: It sparked low in carbon. For those who want to see the molten ingot in action, I also put up a short video: Anyway, lots of things to learn. Niels.