Walter Sorrells
Published on 2 Oct 2015There’s a lot of debate about what is really Damascus steel and what isn’t. Some say it’s ancient crucible steel from Central and South Asia. Some say it’s modern pattern welded steel. In this video, knife maker Walter Sorrells separates fact from fiction.
January 24, 2018
Will the REAL Damascus Steel Please Stand Up?
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October 13, 2017
Casting swords in the movies – forging a lie
Filed under: History, Media, Technology — Tags: Debunking, Metalworking, Movies, Swords — Nicholas @ 02:00
Lindybeige
Published on 11 Nov 2015Casting swords in moulds is something often seen in the movies, and is rubbish. Here I tell you why.
There is a method of making a sword, often depicted in the movies (I give three examples in this video, but there are MANY more), whereby glowing orange iron is poured into a huge mould, and we the viewers see the fiery liquid taking the shape of the hero’s blade-to-be. The snag with this is, it’s rubbish.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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July 20, 2017
The History of Iron and Steel
Filed under: History, Railways, Technology — Tags: Chemistry, Design, Innovation, Metalworking — Nicholas @ 02:00
Published on 21 Dec 2016
Thank you to Mike for helping me with some of the animations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBG-zbNIoy8
How to Make Everything:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM3krXtc7Fc&t=1s
Awe Me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EG34YoRHs8&t=75s
Primitive Technology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVV4xeWBIxE
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May 17, 2016
QotD: Iron, steel, and “stainless” steel
Filed under: Quotations, Randomness, Tools, Woodworking — Tags: Materials, Metalworking, Toronto — Nicholas @ 01:00
As my father the industrial designer used to say, “Stainless steel is so called because it stains less than some other steels.” But give me, by preference, wrought iron from a puddling furnace, for I don’t like shiny. Unfortunately it is not made any more except on a small craft scale: but I have, in the kitchen of the High Doganate, a pair of Chinese scissors that I’ve owned nearly forever, which have never rusted and whose blades stay frightfully sharp (they were only once sharpened). They cost me some fraction of a dollar, back when forever began (some time in the 1970s).
Too, I have an ancient French chef’s knife, nearly ditto, made I think from exactly the steel that went into the Eiffel Tower. It holds an edge like nothing else in my cutlery drawer, and has a weight and balance that triggers the desire to chop vegetables and slice meat.
And there are nails in the wooden hulls of ships from past centuries which have not rusted, after generations of exposure to salt sea and storm. Craft, not technology, went into their composition: there were many stages of piling and rolling, each requiring practised human skill. (The monks in Yorkshire were making fine steels in the Middle Ages; and had also anticipated, by the fourteenth century, all the particulars of a modern blast furnace. But they gave up on that process because it did not yield the quality they demanded.)
What is sold today as “wrought iron” in garden fixtures, fences and gates, is fake: cheap steel with a “weatherproof” finish (a term like “stainless”) painted on. These vicious things are made by people who would never survive in a craft guild. (Though to be fair, they are wage slaves, and therefore each was “only following orders.”)
However, in the Greater Parkdale Area, on my walks, I can still visit with magnificent examples of the old craft, around certain public buildings — for it was lost to us only a couple of generations ago. These lift one’s heart. I can stand before the trolley stop at Osgoode Hall (the real one, not the Marxist-feminist law school named after it). Its fence and the old cow-gates warm the spirit, and raise the mind: if the makers sinned, I have prayed for them.
Almost everywhere else one looks in one’s modern urban environment, one sees fake. This, conversely, leaves the spirit cold, and lowers every moral, aesthetic, and intellectual expectation. To my mind it is sinful to call something what it is not — as is done in every “lifestyle” advertisement — and to my essentially mediaeval mind, the perpetrators ought to be punished in this world, as an act of charity. This could spare them retribution in the next.
David Warren, “For a Godly materialism”, Essays in Idleness, 2015-01-31.
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June 1, 2015
The secret of Damascus steel
Filed under: History, Middle East, Technology, Weapons — Tags: BladedWeapons, Metalworking, MiddleAges, Nanotechnology, Swords — Nicholas @ 03:00
Esther Inglis-Arkell on the “secret ingredient” of Damascus steel:
Damascus swords are the stuff of legend – literally. When Richard the [Lionheart] faced Saladin, Richard is said to have proved his sword’s might by chopping a tree trunk in half with a single blow. Saladin took a silk scarf, threw it into the air, and let it waft down over his sword, where it was promptly cut in two.
Saladin was not the last one to get a Damascene sword, but he was nearer to the last than to the first. Eventually, the knowledge died out, and people have been trying to recreate the swords ever since. This was obviously a step backwards in terms of science, but people didn’t realize how much of a step back until the early 2000s. When scientists took a look at the swords, they found carbon nanotubes and nanowires embedded in them.
As far as we can tell, the nanotubes were created by getting the impurity levels right in the steel-making process. Damascus steel is badly-named, as it originally comes from India. It has a 1.5 percent carbon impurity level, and is commonly known as Wootz steel – which, arguably, is an even worse name. The steel forms a banded structure. There’s a central band of Fe3C, an iron and carbon combination that is tellingly named cementite, surrounded by softer steel. As the sword is made, the maker cris-crosses these bands carefully, making a matrix of hard and soft that leaves the sword both strong and flexible. At the end of the process, the maker pours acid on the sword. This eats away some of the softer steel, but leaves the nanotubes and nanowires, and creates an ultra-strong, sharp outer layer. It also brings out a swirling pattern of dark and light bands that marks it as a Damascus sword.
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May 14, 2014
Turning pixel weapons into bronze and steel
I thought this Geek & Sundry project might be interesting. It’s called Arcade Arms and the idea is they take a weapon from an online game and try to create a real-world version, then use that to see what kind of damage you can do with it. The first episode is about a massively oversize mace from the game Elder Scrolls Online:
Published on 13 May 2014
Jake Powning shows Nika Harper how to forge the Mace of Molag Bal, featured in The Elder Scrolls series. Then Andre Sinou shows her how much damage a mace can really do!
Get Elder Scrolls Online for yourself: http://www.elderscrollsonline.com
In Arcade Arms Nika brings gaming into real life by taking the most potent digital weapons, from Final Fantasy XIV‘s Gae Bolg to Elder Scrolls Online‘s Mace of Molag Bal, and smashing things with their real life counterparts.
Real world downer note: most single-handed weapons were significantly lighter than this fantasy mace: it clocks in at 35 pounds, which is a lot more weight than you’d be able to swing in a real fight (their combat demonstrator also points this out … and note how much smaller the examples he shows are compared to the “Mace of Molag Bal”).
I’d hoped there would be more “how we made this” footage, but I understand the majority of the audience only really want to see how much damage the weapon can do…
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