marius,
I think you are being a bit hard on Larrin. What he set out to do, in part, was to examine some of the long held beliefs ("myths") about pattern welded steel for which there has not been firm scientific evidence. While his findings may confirm some previously held beliefs/convictions, his work shows that some of those beliefs have some factual basis and are not just wishful thinking or traditionally held beliefs (myths).
As far as standardizing his methods, Dr Larrin Thomas is a professional in his field of metallurgy, and well known (at least in the U.S.) for his strong scientific methodology. If you read his web site, you will find a lot of the experimental work he has done on many, many different steels.
His recent work on Damascus (pattern-welded) steels produced a number of important observations IMHO. For example, if you take two carbon steels of different hardness (one hard and one soft), and pattern weld them, you end up with a steel of medium hardness because the carbon "flows" readily and equalizes its concentration across both steels. That's an interesting observation that I had never heard before and may be a new scientific finding.
Another observation that I found fascinating was the effect of pattern welding pure nickel with a hard steel. The nickel is soft, and reduces the overall hardness of the blade, but it led to much improved cutting properties! This related to the alternating pattern of hard steel and soft nickel along the blade's edge, producing tiny serrations as shown by his excellent photo-micrographs.
While one could say these observations are intuitively obvious (they were not for me), the demonstration of these features in a scientific manner is what sets Larrin's work apart from guess work or "experience."
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