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I'm also sharing this project:
https://web.archive.org/web/20081113091234/http://www.elfic.fr/scrimpages/alchimie/nigredo.htm
A French blacksmith who did this knife using a meteorite and mammoth ivory.
Edit: a bit more details on the blade: he melted the meteorite himself, however since the meteorite did not have any carbon and had a really high nickel content or would have make a terrible steel so he added a bit of carbon and some raw iron do dilute the nickel.
Except for that the blade is entirely made from the meteorite.
A French blacksmith who did this knife using a meteorite and mammoth ivory.
It's a beautiful blade, but it SICKENS me a mammoth had to be killed to make this.
BE the change you want to see 🌟
Ivory comes from a lot of things, but i doubt this came from an extinct animal one that went extinct durong the fucking bronze age.
Also the ivory probably came from like a narwhal or whale or something.
Here's the page where the artist mentions the mammoth Ivory: https://web.archive.org/web/20081113092306/http://www.elfic.fr/scrimpages/alchimie/albedo.htm
Here's a page where you can buy some mammoth ivory: https://arcticantiques.com/
Fuck guess it was made of mammoth ivory, guess i just assumed most of it had rotted away by now. Which still shows my retardation since im very well aware there are ivory artifacts found in europe dated in the tens of theousands of years.
Don't sweat it. Until those post I had never considered the possibility of mammoth ivory being a thing. In my head, ivory is very much a modern thing, that comes only from elephants, even though I know better
Mammoth ivory is actually quite easy to find online.
There is a lot of mammoth ivory found in Siberia. Especially in the area where the permafrost is melting locals people are finding a lot of mammoth remains apparently.
Some people even tried mammoth steak.
(it was horrible, get your steaks fresh)
Mammoths have been extinct for thousands of years...
That's the joke.
Are we still doing "woosh" here?
Tldr knife nerd rant about steel quality. You can probably skip this and not miss out on anything.
Gonna be honest, as someone who also makes knives and swords, hearing that someone heated the meteorite up to red hot is enough to hurt my soul, finding out they actually melted it down or got it hot enough to fold and homogenize the steel just makes me angry.
You're killing everything that makes the meteorite cool, and making it no different than a chunk of scrap steel you find at a slag dump.
The cool stuff to me is the shape of it, and the amazing crystalline patterns you get when meteorites are etched with acid.
Meteors cooled over a very long time, and the longer the steel takes to cool, the larger the crystalline structure. For usable knives, you want that crystalline structure to be very small. That's what the "quench" is in knife making. Super basic heat treatment has you heat the steel until it's no longer magnetic, then plunge the steel into oil. The rapid cooling makes sure the crystalline structure is small.
So my favorite meteorite knives are the ones with regular knife steel, and then they incorporate the etched meteo into the design. Some even set it into the blade in its own little puzzle piece, some put it as a handle accent, some put it into the sheath. I'm a fan of all of these.
Sure, it makes it technically more rare, but so does putting caesium in your turkey sandwich.
Can't argue with his skill though. We may differ in opinions on meteorite use, but hot damn is that a sexy knife. I've seen some pretty fantastic railroad spike knives in my day.