Wootz - The True Damascus Steel? 

It's only Wootz if it's grown in the Woot region of France, otherwise it's just called sparkling Damascus.

I think that Mr. Pendry created the closest approximation of wootz as he used ore from the mine in Syria where they were sourcing the metals for the blades historically. Moreover, they may have had special forging techniques that were specialized for that wootz steel just like there are different forging techniques for modern steels.

This is a great study, thanks! Great work by all, particularly Spencer on making and providing this Wootz!

If "Wootz" is referencing the ancient material - then I think making it with modern methods in bulk would affect the term used - like lab grown gems vs natural. Your tangents were not a distraction and appreciated in fact as it's hard to balance the myth of steel with the practicality of modern science.

Thank you so much for doing this. This will be a great place to send people who constantly rattle on about wootz being some type of indestructible super steel.

I like what FZ Knives does with his crucible “Wootz” He uses modern steels from drill bits/tool steel types mixed with powdered steels, carbon and other alloying agents. Beautiful patterns that have got to be much tougher than historical wootz.

Very good video. One nice inclusion is the acknowledgement that there is a vast variety of wootz compositions as well as heat treatments, each with vastly different material properties

Well, we all know that you can't get the *legendary* hardness without quenching it in the blood of your enemies, so there's your problem. Seriously though -- great video, great scientific approach, and I'd love to see more with other combinations for a "better, modern wootz."

Woot

wootz and damascus steel both seem like they were made from scraps of traditionally folded iron just chucked into a crucible, "Can't do anything with this nugget, lets try and put it in a clay jar with some dry leaves, sand, and an animal tooth to give it some power." and created early steel

I always enjoy your content. Your website has helped me a lot in understanding metallurgy in general. Ive learned more about metallurgy from your videos/website than I have from any of my university material science courses and really appreciate how you put to rest a lot of the debates about what is best wether it be damascus, super-steels, etc. I look forward to seeing what you do next👍

Thank you very much Larrin for this great study and video!

Yea boyy another KSN vid!

Interesting discussion.. thanks for sharing

"We can make better steel today". I can hear them coming out of the wood work 🐜 🪰🪳🪳🦟

If you haven't yet, a good book to look into is Medieval Islamic Swords and Swordmaking: Kindi's Treatise 'On swords and their kind' by Robert G. Hoyland and Brian Gilmour. I read through it last year, and while the wording isn't the clearest in English, it seemed to me that the wootz swordsmiths had a pretty good understanding of optimizing hardness and toughness for the particular blade through changes in heat treatment.

Thank you for citing the distinct differences.

Thank you! This filled in a lot of gaps for me with regards to heat treating.

I remember reading years ago an article about a damascus viking wootz sword found in the sea near scotland. Microscopic image showed a black chrismastree like structure in rows. Unfortunately i don't remember which publication it was in

Great video, very insightful.

Good video!! Awesome stuff!!! Really nice to see someone not always cranking out high carbide or super steel videos.

Fascinating, as usual!

Great information! I'd definitely love to see the 52100 woots!

you're such a knife steel nerd omg!! i love it

Thank you Larrin!

Knerd! Awesome work.

This is the video i was looking for all these years

Bastante informativo 🤜🤛

I was just thinking about this a couple days ago. Weird. Thanks!

Point of order: the older Damascus blades, generally but not exclusively made from wootz steel (there was an iron industry in that region of Syria for a long time) were called that because they were associated with the city of Damascus, where they were forged and traded. The local Syrian steel at the time also produced blades with that tightly packed grainy pattern. Modern pattern-welded Damascus steel is meant to evoke the historical stuff but the process and results are very different.

Very interesting.thank you

Like always, very interesting video! Thanks! I would like to see 52100-wootz steel. And some kind of modern wootz-pattern springsteel, if its even possble 😀

Love your Conte t, and bought your first book for a blacksmithing nerd friend of mine. 😁 Per the charts on your site, have you considered having someone code up a way for users to pick an arbitrary number of specific steels to chart? Seems like it would be easy to code, and would make it much simpler to compare steels.

I would love to see a paper/video on how to improve wootz. Peter Schwartz-Burt is another maker to consider for his wootz

Gosh that Wootz is beautiful! Good info here

I really like my roselli uhc wootz carpenter's knife. It's supposed to be somewhere around 64-66hrc.

It's a fun and enlightening video. It's one of my favorites on your channel so far. Thanks.

After listening to the precision in explaining how, what and why on a few videos I’d just really enjoy someone trying to argue with you on this topic. Hahaha Great stuff.

This was really interesting, I always wondered how the legendary Damascus lived up to the hype with all those stories out there about it cutting through other swords and such. I guess they are just that though, over embellished stories. With toughness test low it'd certainly suffer from a major edge crack if not a complete blade fracture if you tried to cut another sword.

Looking at some of the charts I'd best very interested in seeing a show down between two san mai blades. One blade would have a core of 1084 with 15n20 jackets and the second blade would be a 15n20 core with 1084 jackets. It'd be interesting to see which one ended up tougher, harder, and had better edge retention or if they'd up pretty close to identical. I think the 15n20 jacket with 1084 would perform between than it's counterpart.

Good stuff.

Be cool to see one on the evolution of the Samurai swords from the beginning all the way up to the super iconic Katana

Holy shit, this has teaching material quality!

Examining the ancient steel at such an in depth level was fascinating. Unrelated tangent, but have they ever asked you to be a judge on forged in fire ? Lol and if so would you do it if scheduling issues were not a factor?

Wootsie daisy, I’ve never been and am still not sold on woots. Great content as always!

Woot! A discussion on wootz!

love you research work and all hail magnacut king of steels

Wootz steel has to have a certain percentage of Vanadium and other metals in it, because what Saladin had mined was around the area of Damascus, which had trace amounts of Vanadium in the iron ore.

I produced a seax in 1080 with some great looking carbide banding on it after repeated etchings to show up the hamon. Never tried to repeat it, maybe I should. Even at the time I thought "hey, this looks like wootz".

On the conversation of what is wootz. Maybe I'm not a purist but to me. 52100 is basically modern production wootz. Because of the banding it can have. M2 is high speed steel wootz A2 is air hardening die steel wootz I haven't messed with ingot stainless that has banding like that but I'm sure there a good stainless wootz candidate out there.

Please, make a video explaining about the s5 shock steel

where can i purchase the knife shown in the video ??? it looks fantastic also this is some great scientific work

Im interested in improoving that cool wootz stuff, yeah

You can have a sliding scale of definition for what is wootz, the ancient method and type being exactly wootz but all changes made to that process with whatever justification as a professional can also be considered wootz. People weren't strict with definitions in the past and it was probably just called that because of an area or something in the process. Saying that i'd love to see your rendition of wootz steel with modern techniques and understandings.

If you put sand in the mix, and bring the ore to boiling point, the impurities will bleed into the glass formed from the sand, and you can just hammer that off and have a much more pure steel.

Wootz is a specific forging process/ technology/ heat treatment.

the original Damascus was called such because thats where Europeans believed it was from. I believe the ore( with trace amounts of vanadium) came from an area in Modern day Jordan. Original Damascus is a type of Wootz steel but not all wootz is Damascus. Pattern welded steel was called "Damascus"such because it first tried to imitate the natural pattern ( caused by the vanadium I believe) seen in true Damascus.

Thank you for this analysis. I fear it may provoke more foolish controversy about what should really be called "Damascus" and perhaps open the door for well-meaning advocacy regarding what should properly be called Wootz. In any event, interesting steels, and all useful.

I'll watch this video later this afternoon but I'm forsure excited being I have a huge wootz collection lol also. Please tell me your thoughts on sld magic

To me the best way to define Wootz would be less the steel than the means of making the steel. Basically a way to refine iron and/or pieces of steel into a usable steel ingot using a small crucible and furnace.

You would think by the way in which people online talk about the quality of the steel produced in feudal times that the blacksmiths had magic powers.

True Wootz (The legendary one) is made from an ore found only in Jordan, which was exported to Damascus Syria centuries ago and had a certain content only that Jordanian ore has. Saladin used it for his armies weapons which really helped the Muslims take back Jerusalem during the Crusades. This is the famous steel with the perfect iron ore content which made swords and knives of that time so sought after. The true Wootz Damascus. I am lucky enough to have two of those swords and both have the makers mark of which i am trying to research now.

As the TCC chart gets more crowded I wonder if a CATRA medium that’s less abrasive would be better so you can get larger variations between steels.

The ancients had no way to beat modern quality control. With that said, I think Wootz steel swords were better than pattern welded steel swords at the time.

I have a question about your tables on the website. When you give a steel a rating, 1-10, for toughness and edge retention, is that score relative to only those steels in the same category, I.e. stainless? For example 1095 has a toughness rating of 4.5, while 14C28N/AEB-L has a toughness rating of 9. Are 14C28N/AEB-L really that much tougher than 1095?

Very informative video, thank You very much! Need to watch it at least onece more to understand all that - and implate it into my current view to damascus steel. To me, there is no "this is the real" - those 2 methods of making "damascus Steel" are just two different ways to combine the elements for having the best of them into the final piece of steel that makes the cutting tool. I've got a first Edition of Manfred Sachse's Book "Damascus Steel". For me that boook is kind of a "holy grail" in books about damascus steel. He goes very much into patterns and how to create them (also letters in torn damascus eg for firearm barrels; some swords have been found, still unknown how they've been forged to get the pattern they have) and there is a relatively short chapter in that book called "Wootz - The REAL Damascus?" I'm fascinated of the art of makig the alloy in a crucible and then forge from a solid block. Especially when I see the more and more inflative use of borax in so many videos on RU-vid. Although some awesome blades are created that way, to me excessive use of Borax is not the "real high art" of making damascus steel. One of my favorite Knife-making channels on RU-vid is borax-free; the guy of "FZ-making knives" also uses springs, ball bearings, razor- or scalpel blades,... as source for his knifes, but he makes them of Wootz Steel. Awesome knifes!

This is way, way over my head, I was never a materials science nerd, so forgive me if you covered this and I missed it, but in my quick watch I don't think it was covered, and what I'm about to say might be pure internet legend. I read once that the 'Historic Damascus' had a specific property/impurity/allow to it wherein it would cause the cutting edge of the blade to have 'microscopic serrations' and this was the science behind the legend. Sort of like that Roman volcanic dust concrete that was so amazing. Perhaps it was just legend? Was this a part of your inquiry?

Would cryo treatment help with pearlite conversion in woots or does cryo only help with higher chromium steels?

can you make a video on magnacut Damascus

Heavy forge is another channel that is very good at this.

While it is probably not possible to do “real” tests without a time machine. I am curious if you have data or opinions about historic wootz vs mono vs pattern welded steel qualities.

Wootz is not the older of the two styles of forging. Pattern welding was done for centuries before metallurgists were able to reach the temperatures required to make Wootz. But calling pattern-welding Damascus came about long after Wootz steel became commonplace.

My understanding of Wootz developed as traditional Damascus when pattern welded steels, and their popularity supplanted traditional Damascus in popular dialect as Damascus. I think I saw Al Pendry trying to recreate the types of steel ingots traded around Damascus in Syria during the Ottoman Empire. That kind of ingot steel became colloquially known as Damascus steel. Wootz seems to be some misinterpretation of an Indian word for ingot steel.

Hey Larin, do you know approximately how much nitrogen it takes to get the same hardening effect as .1% carbon?

Interesting, I never heard the argument of “if it’s not made in Wootz Region, it’s not wootz.” Before. That seems much to simplistic. I would expect that Wootz is either the metal composition or method of making the steel, or both. Since we can’t analyze ancient examples we can answer half the question. But I always heard the method of manufacture was lost to time.

was from a mine in india?

What does the material have to do with the city damascus?

This kind of takes me back to a local community college prof swearing that tamahagane was superior to modern steels... methinks his references on this subject were largely chambara films.

FZ making knives on here does some pretty nice damascus knives

best modern wootz ive seen is from 'FZ Making Knives'

Do the Ulfberht swords count as wootz, or are they just pattern welded "Damascus"?

Why do they cll the ancient version "wootz"?

I think the trouble is that the stories of wootz superiority come from a time where other bladed weapons maybe weren't as good, or were most often up against lower technology steels and so definitely were an improvement, and some of the stories may even be some early propaganda... Careful fighting people from this region because they have wootz which can do all these amazing things... Also I think that to call a steel wootz, it must be made the same way, using the same materials as it was historically. However i think that the process could be used with modern technique but then should be renamed so as to distinguish it from the historic.

This is always a grenade-like subject on steels, everyone running around screaming. In terms of a definition I think if its made as a traditional crucible and material content that's producing the properties its known for (visually and composition) then it comes into the bespoke, hand made steels prior to heavy industrialisation. Which means I kind of lump it into the same sort of category as things like various hand made steels from SE-Asia and Japan or Bulat steel. Not being mean, its just a unique steel in every batch that will have some variations. As say compared to the industrial steels we use today which tend to be a little more rigorous in their composition... mostly! After a recent dalliance into low-alloy, very low manganese content high carbon steels. They are really their own animal when it comes to heat treatment, my fast-oil was inconsistent and I switched over to Aqua-Quench which can deliver that 'near water' hardness (1.5-8.5 ratio) along with the living on the edge anxiety of having many hours of work crack and die. I've since switched over to using it on my 26C3 knives and probably won't go back to oil on them. Heavy Forge has always done some really fantastic work so he's worth checking out for his artistry as well.

Let’s see how much better this is than bloomery steel .

Have you had the opportunity to see how damasteel is made?

Its interestig you are seeking martensite. I weld on high alloy steels like a514 and hardox, and i have to preheat and keep the weld area hot for a time after welding explicitly to avoid martensite forming, bu letting the weldment cook slowly we know it retains the composition of the original alloy.

Even if Wootz isn’t superior to modern steels I can still understand the romanticism of an ancient technique. Same justification as the interest in mechanical watches as opposed to much more accurate quartz watches. For me, I’ll take modern powder steels 😬.

This was fantastic!! Thank you! I think toughness is the main property that gave wootz its mythical status. A sword that bends and springs back is far more valuable than a razor sharp edge. I think a modern wootz would make an amazing knife steel not necessarily for its superior performance but for its beauty. Needs to be consistently heat treatable. Definitely subscribing and can’t wait to see more! Oh and I think wootz should be defined as a traditionally manufactured or primitive crucible steel. Must include carbide structures but I don’t think we need to be more specific than that.

All I know is the steel is so beautiful

Finally someone using proper terminology for pattern welded steel and Damascus.

I'm all for making the definition require the material be made in tiny shops.

I import wootz from Rajasthan india. Could I send you one to take a look at and test. Looks dendritic

I've gptta ask, can any blade, sacred magical wootz included, slice a scarf in the air? The physics I know won't allow it.

If Wootz is actually not very tough, why was it so highly prized as a material for warfare sword blades?

I've got a question about 'grain' of the steel, AKA if there's a curve in the steel, that's forged out, rather than grinded or CNC-machined, which one's stronger? How does, or how could this affect knifemaking? There's a lot of debate about forged steel with that or just cutting a knife out from a steel blank, and I usually forge mine close to the dimensions anyway. And I mean pretty close sometimes. I think the tip of the blade is important, that you cut it diagonally (backwards) and then forge it into the desired correct angle, which the 'grain' of the steel shifts to that direction. Correct me, if that's wrong though. I'd like to hear your insight about this.

Rex-121 & Magnacut Wootz-Damascus Go! You can do it!!

Last thing I saw/read was those cake ingots came from India or something. Might be mistaken

Wootz Damascus is called so due to its area of origin. Not due to the partern. A Damascus blade was not inherintly paterned. Its like saying made in the USA. They are just now assosiated words

I think wootz as a term is best used understood as a historical and archaeological term rather than a metallurgical one. It was a term used to describe blades from a specific period of time that when subjected to the processes of that time led to a characteristic visual and performance characteristic. Modern Wootz-like steel can be produced but it will never be the Real Deal. This definition isn't very useful in the context of this video though and also provides space for reddit wootz supremacists to fortify their beliefs. In any other setting though it likely provides the most accuracy and utility.