Since the patterning in wootz is intrinsic to the material, provided you don’t overheat it, taking an old blade back to the fire should be no more dangerous to the pattern than when it was initially forged. And if the re-flattening of the blade was done with care (or with a hydraulic press
), you would not induce much distortion of the underlying pattern with the small dimensional change involved in erasing a set of ladders. If I have time this weekend I’ll do a test with before, during and after photos on some wootz of recent vintage.
The occasional parallel lines I immediately chalked up to stray swipes of the hypothetical angle grinder, but it also occurred to me that if one were laddering an already-thin piece of wootz, it is possible that in forging out the ladders on one side, a slight distortion in the opposite side’s pattern could occur & cause ‘ghost’ ladders – since the metal directly under a rung would stretch slightly less than the full thickness metal to either side. If the buyer chimes in we can ask if the ghosts are aligned with the other side’s ladders.
I didn’t do it either, Ric, but back in ’04 I did use a grinder to put a similar pattern into a knife, I’ll try to remember where I stashed that bit of metal and see what it looks like.
Dr. Figiel was still with us in ’98, when he auctioned off his collection at Butterfield’s.