Today, I wanted to combine two themes: hot metal and knives.
This is not actually random. I ran across this while looking at some posts on the Knife Steel Nerds blog.
Our feature: “The Secrets of Wootz Damascus Steel”. Back in the old days, sword blades were made out of a steel known as “Wootz steel“.
A lot of work has been put in to rediscovering how they were made. Among the people involved were Al Pendray, a knifemaker and farrier from Florida, and John Verhoeven, a metallurgist and emeritus engineering professor from Iowa State.
This is a documentary about Mr. Pendray and Mr. Verhoven and two swordsmiths from Jordan working to make Wootz steel from ore mined in Jordan: “a mine that is known to have produced weapons for Saladin himself.” I know this is longer than usual, but the next two are coffee break size.
Bonus video: Al Pendray passed away in 2017. This is a 15 minute tribute to him from The Craftsmanship Initiative.
Related blog post from The Craftsmanship Initiative’s website.
John Verhoeven has also written a book: Damascus Steel Swords: Solving the Mystery of How to Make Them (affiliate link). He also has another book, Steel Metallurgy for the Non-Metallurgist (affiliate link) which is highly recommended by Knife Steel Nerds. (I’d actually like to have both of these books, but they are kind of expensive.)
Bonus video #2: Holy cow! I did not know this, but apparently the late Anthony Bourdain was doing some sort of tie-in with The Balvenie called “Raw Craft”. In this one (only about 12 minutes) he went up to Washington state “to see firsthand how master bladesmith, Bob Kramer crafts the perfect kitchen knife from melted meteorite”.
The Craftsmanship Initiative also did a long profile of Mr. Kramer, which I’m bookmarking to read later.