Meteorite Dagger?

[A. G. Maisey]

Yes, meteoritic material can be cut, polished etched, and mounted as a blade. This has been done by some custom knife makers in the US, and possibly in other places, too.

When meteoritic material has been used as pamor in keris and other items of wesi aji in Jawa, the fragments of meteoritic material have been wrapped in an iron envelope, welded together, and then repeatedly folded and welded until the material was clean. The end product of this process could be used to make a blade, or it could be used to adorn a blade as pamor.

However, it is possible to take pieces of meteoritic material and weld these pieces into a solid, clean mass of material. I have done this on several occasions, and although I only produced small billets, just large enough to provide pamor material for a keris, after combining with iron, if I had had a larger quantity of meteorite, I could easily have produced a billet large enough for a knife blade made entirely of meteoritic material.

If I can do it, other people could have done it. It is possible.

As for identifying meteoritic material after it has been forged, well, the famous historical metallurgist Professor Jerzy Piaskowski of Poland cannot advise of any way in which this can be done, and judging from the response I have had from other analytical metallugists spread across the globe, including a couple who specialise in analysis of meteorites, nobody else can tell us how to do it either.