Blade streightening failure and a new leason

[Sly]

If you use a charcoal/coal then you kinda throw the propane advice out the window sort theres no real way to keep a part exactly at 1600 for half an hour. what you can do is do a higher heat and then normalize down to cool the first few times then juggle your heat. You can do this by bringing it up to 1800 move it back and forth let it cool to 1500 then bring it back up again and let it cool, to the ideal temp. Ideally youre letting one part cool while heating a colder section so the heat balances out at 1600.

It also helps to use some oil in your coals and get the entire stack a bright orange and pass through that, you can also clean the steel off while its air cooling to give yourself a more even heat.

It took me a while to get that technique down, the iron tube method seems ok but my forge would melt it.

[ThomasPowers]

I've seen a number of wootz swords with a mild wrought iron tang forge welded on around the ricasso area.  I've also seen the famous example of a sword with alternating  Chevrons of pattern welded and wootz welded together. (I was the gofer when Al Pendray was doing a version of that as a Quad-State demo).  I don't recall any examples where the smith simply ran out of material.  Can you suggest a source I need to add to my library?

[Sly]

Well by simply running out of material im referring to there not being enough steel in a single billet to make the entire blades worth tang included. Mostly by wootz im referring to the arabic/middle eastern blades not european crucible. Theres a few Ulfberht swords that do have it (I do not remember the numbers for those swords off the top of my head) but its pretty common for sabers like the tulwar to have a scarf weld on it. Some of oakshot's mislabed crusade swords forged in the middle east have them.

goodluck researching anything non European though, rest of the world did it first and then it just crept through the darkages where britan is supposedly the only ones writing  XXXX in latin still (ignoring all the the middle eastern and asain written languages because apparently they dont count as language) Cultural narcissism is a XXXXX.
 

[ThomasPowers]

OK, "planned use of multiple wootz ingots to craft a swordblade" I was interpreting "running out" as an unexpected  occurrence.

The  Ulfberht swords were crucible steel and not Wootz as I recall.  Has further research contradicted that?  They definitely were not worked in a manner to bring out the wootz patterning.

Dr Feuerbach makes a point of mentioning that both wootz and crucible steels were being made in her thesis "Crucible Steel in Central Asia".   There is also a charming superset of a Thesis on smelting done in Sri Lanka; you may remember the letter in nature on the monsoon powered smelters there; it grew into a much greater than a thesis work; I can dig out it's title when I get home.  Also not particular to this discussion is "Metal Technology in Medieval India"  a bit jingoistic but some fascinating methods---like the refining of zinc into metal rather than the  European "colouring of copper" using zinc containing ores as described in "De la Pirotechnia".

[Frosty]

Sly: Please moderate your own language to something you'd let your 6 yr old daughter read/listen to. I'm soaking up too much fascinating stuff from your posts to want to see you put on moderated status. Admin is serious as all gitout about this being a G rated site. Yeah that's, capital G rated. Xxxxing your own language only goes so far. 

I'm not admin, I've just been here long enough to have a handle on how things work and want to help others fit in as smoothly as possible.

Frosty The Lucky.

[eutrophicated1]

The terminology used by blade smiths, the various words, phrases, etc., may not have the same definitions by everyone using them.  For example, when the word 'normalization' is used, it may have different meanings or evoke different processes in the minds of various people.  In the end, the specific steps used in knife making procedures must be expressed very carefully, so that there is no misunderstanding between us.

Having come from engineering/chemistry/physics and computer programming lines of work, all of which have differing definitions for 'normalization', I hesitate to use the term, ever.

Now heat-treating, hardening, quenching and tempering all have good contextual meanings for knife makers.  Yet I've seen the term 'normalization' used very differently in discussions about damascus steel making, including wootz masters.  In particular, Al Pendrey used the term when air cooling freshly made crucible ingots.  In fact he cycled the ingots through several-to-five heat soaks in his forge to very specific temps, before letting them air cool to ambient temps, before ever beginning to 'work' the ingots into billets.  And he called that process 'normalization'.  I'm convinced he was referring to reduction in carbide crystalline sizes.  Only after doing this procedure did he take small cuttings off the ingots to send out for metalurgical and chemical analysis.  Of course Al was 10 years older than me at the time, so I listened very carefully to every word that man said, inferring as much meaning as possible.  The ore he used to make those ingots had vanadium in it.  Very rare.  The ingots contained .05 to .15 per cent vanadium.  The old swords and knives made from the original Indian wootz, were never cut or folded.  The damascus patterns were naturally derived out of the original crucible steel making process, just as Al Pendrey's were.

[Steve Sells]

Every field has its own jargon. Knife makers have a very well defined definition of Normalization. If you are going to carry one discussions about heat treating blades it would be a good idea to learn a few of those terms to reduce confusion