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Post by randomnobody on Aug 2, 2011 21:37:23 GMT
Oh, it was a Gen 2? I somehow failed to notice. No wonder it wasn't hurt by the katana.
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Post by Vincent Dolan on Aug 2, 2011 22:05:37 GMT
Yeah; I look at swords pretty much all day every day, so I think I'd recognize one when I saw it.
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Post by randomnobody on Aug 2, 2011 22:26:35 GMT
This may be blasphemy, but...I have better things to look at all day than swords. Still, I'm surprised I didn't notice BACK THEN LOL.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Aug 2, 2011 22:33:36 GMT
Randomnobody, I have watched that show too...it was an amazing test. I believe he made the two swords out of the same steel (if not same, similar) so I thought it is the geometry that played most part in the katana breaking out. But either way, my argument here is - A SWORD IS FOR BATTLE. Not for cutting mats or water bottles. So, whatever the geometry needs be, to hold edge, that should be it. Tempered, differentially heat treated, all sorts of hardness tests...you do what you have to...but end of the day, if my sword gets a nick banging with other swords in the battle, I LOSE. I'm proud of my test and my views and often I'm surprised that how a man loses his simplicity amidst all the modern, intricate developments. If these developed into some sort of argument - it is not my intention.
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Post by Vincent Dolan on Aug 2, 2011 22:38:11 GMT
Well, you've got a life, my friend. Key difference between you and I.
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SeanF
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Post by SeanF on Aug 2, 2011 23:48:41 GMT
A sword is for battle? Aw crap, I got mine for hanging on the wall and backyard cutting. I better go take them back now.
Sarcasm aside, swords are tools just like everything else. And like every tool they are optimized for their use. A sword optimized for battle will be beefier, and a sword optimized for lighter cutting will be thinner. Do you think if the medieval period people who used these took mat cutting seriously they would insist on only using swords made for the battle field. Of course not, that is just ridiculous. They used whatever sword suited their purposes the best.
Having a historically accurate sword is just a hobby. As long as everyone is honest about what is what neither traditional or competition geometries are intrinsically superior. It's like saying using a road bike for a trip is cheating because back in the day they didn't have good roads and it wouldn't hold up under those conditions.
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Post by randomnobody on Aug 3, 2011 1:28:39 GMT
But that's just the thing, THAT sword, the Lion Dog, is NOT "for battle," it us for dojo cutting. Your tulwar, well, it's NOT for dojo cutting, that's for sure.
Like we've been saying, swords have evolved and now they're for different things than fighting wars.
And I really wish you'd get it out of your head that soldiers fought by "banging with other swords" as that is absolutely NOT the case. Swords met, sure, but they didn't bang together.
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Post by Vincent Dolan on Aug 3, 2011 1:50:50 GMT
And if it could at all be helped, edges never met, though historical evidence shows this did happen from time to time. And you know what? There's plenty of chips on those swords, too. Sometimes far more significant than that little nick in Darkguy's Lion Dog; know what else? Historical swordsmen polished/sharpened out the nicks and kept using their swords. They sure as hell didn't cast it aside saying it was trash steel.
By the way, the point that Darkguy doesn't seem to be getting is that even swords used for killing had changes in geometry that made them more brittle than their war sword counterparts. Easiest example is the katana: the sword used during the latter half of the Muromachi period, the Sengoku period, when armored combat occurred on a frequent basis, the swords were thick, heavy beasts that ripped through armor. Comparatively, the sword used during the Edo period, also known as the Tokugawa regime, was a lighter, thinner sword used in unarmored combat; its greatest enemy was flesh and bone, not iron and steel, so it needed a much thinner geometry to easily penetrate skin. It also had to be lighter and easier to recover with because, hello, one well placed stroke in unarmored combat can kill you, whereas the only real way to kill a man in armor is to aim for the weak points, so if you took a glancing blow that would kill someone unarmored, you could generally shrug it off (relatively speaking, of course).
Getting back to my original point: swords aren't used for killing now, only cutting mats/bottles/other similar mediums. Ergo, they need to be have thinner geometries to make the cut as effortless as possible. Asking such a thin blade to take damage you would find in combat is like asking a rapier to stand up to a beastly XIIIa.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Aug 4, 2011 1:42:18 GMT
I think it is going bit far...just one simple question if anyone cares to answer...When I banged the swords (as few people may consider it a silly test) why the tulwar sword's edge remained intact (almost invisible nick) and why lion dog katana's edge had a noticeable nick? Again checking the geometry of the sword, the antique tulwar is thinner and lighter than the katana - so the katana is the beefier one here. How many factors play here? Sword geometry? Not so much Quality control from Hanwei's factory? Error in heat treatment as this is mass produced?
So, what is the best sword? The one which cuts the mats and water bottles well (believe me the tulwar cuts better than the katana)? Or the one which is resilient to damage when abused in battle and still maintains the edge fair bit?
I am not saying that the swords should have magic edge which would cleave other metals into two...as we see in movies which is stupid...there will be edge damage...but less the damage, better the quality of the sword (and steel). Disagree?
If anyone care to answer in one or two sentances, that'd be good enough. If this is too simple, I apologise. I guess end of the day, all the effort, analysis, algorithems you put in place, it has only few applications to the end user - in this case a warrior. Thank you very much.
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Post by Opferous on Aug 4, 2011 2:38:49 GMT
Two possible explanations (although there surely are more):
1) Edge geometry. Talking purely about the nick, if your talwar is duller or has more of a clamshell/appleseed bevel than the Lion Dog, then by nature of its edge geometry, it will resist damage more. It just will have more difficulty entering light targets.
2) HRC. Your talwar could have higher HRC. Means it's harder, will nick the other blade. Also means ceteris paribus, the talwar will be more brittle. Sacrifices.
tl;dr - Damage to edge does not mean broken sword. Snapping of sword means broken sword. Therefore nicking is not a fair judge of a sword's quality. Steel quality (overall, not heat treatment quality) should be judged by its properties, not the properties of the object into which it was formed.
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SeanF
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Post by SeanF on Aug 4, 2011 4:55:16 GMT
I don't know about you, but I am not a warrior and I doubt anyone else who bought the Lion Dog is either. You can't judge an object by a set of standards it was never meant to meet.
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Post by Vincent Dolan on Aug 4, 2011 6:20:20 GMT
It'd be like using an M16 with a retractable polymer stock as a club and getting pissy when it breaks.
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Post by randomnobody on Aug 4, 2011 19:34:07 GMT
I would lean toward 1 at present, with the information given.
Even though you say the tulwar is the thinner, lighter of the two, that tells us nothing about the actual geometry of each blade. Chances are the actual shape of the tulwar is rounder, for simplicity, than that of the Lion Dog, and thus the edge of the tulwar is "thicker" than the edge of the Lion Dog. An overall thinner sword would still have an easier time with tatami, as tests have proven tatami is not merely something as simple as the "sharper" sword (one of our own members, a few years ago, cut tatami with a sword deemed near-blunt) or a "thinner" sword (that same sword was quite thick) but more geometry of the edge.
I highly doubt that it could be 2, as the Lion Dog should be 58-60+ HRC, and I'm not sure antique tulwar were capable of this hardness, though they may have been. I am not too familiar with that region and its history of combat methods, so I can't say any more on that subject, and won't try to delve into the "proper use" or even "battlefield techniques" of a tulwar.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Aug 5, 2011 5:15:50 GMT
[quote=" I highly doubt that it could be 2, as the Lion Dog should be 58-60+ HRC, and I'm not sure antique tulwar were capable of this hardness, though they may have been. I am not too familiar with that region and its history of combat methods, so I can't say any more on that subject, and won't try to delve into the "proper use" or even "battlefield techniques" of a tulwar.[/quote] I thought so too. Tulwars never had HRC 60. I also read that wootz steel (or ancient tulwar steel) cuts better and more resilient to edge deformation at around HRC 41 (please google Wear tests of steel knife blades by John D. Verhoeven, Alfred H. Pendray, Howard F. Clark). Another thing, the tulwar geometry is slender than the katana - the width and thickness of the tulwar blade is less compared to the katana, sharpness is equivalent to Katana. But I still couldn't conclude that 1S steel is any superior to conventional high carbon steel varities. Maybe I should do a head-on, more aggressive type test...but I don't want to destroy the katana completely and still want to keep the it in the display stand. Thanks again guys. Hope I didn't upset anyone. If so, my apologies
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Post by randomnobody on Aug 5, 2011 5:39:45 GMT
Eh, the worst you did in my mind was risk harm to an old blade. Second worse was form a conclusion based on a single test, of only one specimen, and try to pass it off as a rule. About the geometry/width/thickness, I'm still pondering the matter of edge thickness, a vastly different thing than blade thickness. Any blade, at any given point, can be one or another thickness, and while any given tulwar may have a thinner spine than any given katana, I have to believe that an antique tulwar at least has a greater edge thickness than a Hanwei katana. The best way to illustrate what I am getting at here, short of drawing it out (which I suck at drawing so I'll pass~) is to compare the actual cutting edge of a typical Hanwei sword to the letter V. Seriously, that's how it's shaped. Flat all the way to the edge, no real "meat" (the Japanese term even being "niku") behind the edge, just a straight grade into the edge. V As opposed to the "ideal" edge shape, which is difficult to illustrate via ASCII characters, but imagine it as the bottom half of () or some such. The edge actually curves, round, from the spine. On second thought, I'm sure we've all seen this already, but it's got better pictures than I could make: www.bugei.com/niku.htmlThat's basically what I'm getting at. A blade with "niku" or a sufficiently rounded edge geometry will be far more resilient to damage than one that is completely flat, however one that is completely flat will be perceived as "sharper" and will generally present less resistance through soft targets than an edge with more fat on it. The Lion Dog, most likely, has far less of this fat than your tulwar, which makes its edge brittle by comparison. Of course, this is actually a design point, on purpose, on the Hanwei's side. That's just how they make their swords, as specialized dojo mat cutters. Hanwei isn't concerned with heading off to large-scale battle, just making one tatami mat into as many parts of a tatami mat as effortlessly as possible, and thus they have specifically engineered the geometry of their blades to present as little fat as possible. Though, some argue that niku, or let's just call it the convex edge geometry, when implemented properly is actually superior to a completely flat edge in soft target cutting, but I'm afraid I can't remember the exact argument. Something about a wedge, but I'll have to go look that up again... I can't think of any tests that would properly confirm one or another side of this debate, and it seems you have put more thought into it than originally presented, but the conclusion you achieved is inherently flawed, if only by virtue of coming from only one test specimen. If I'd bought a Lion Dog, and an antique tulwar, then whacked them both edge-on-edge, and the tulwar broke in two while the Lion Dog remained unfazed, would anybody here think "Oh, so Hanwei's new steel is actually pretty amazing!" or "Wait, what about that guy whose Lion Dog got nicked by another antique tulwar?" Or, perhaps, their thoughts would be "OMG THAT GUY JUST BROKE AN ANTIQUE SWORD!! GET HIM!!!"
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ghost
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Post by ghost on Aug 6, 2011 17:15:41 GMT
I don't think anyone here believes that hanwei's new special steel(s) hold any noticeably beneficial properties. I have a bamboo mat and I certainly don't notice much beyond better QC (hishigami,same, etc). ~ LOL they dumped in a grain of gold and called it HW-1 and 2 :shock: ~~I personally like the hamons on them.~
We were just trying to persuade you that banging a paper-cutting edge against a blunter (tulwar) non-shaving edge would cause this to happen. (Unless you're a phenomenal sharpener and spent the long time to razor up the edge of an antique before you banged them together :twisted: )
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SeanF
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Post by SeanF on Aug 6, 2011 20:13:02 GMT
If HWS-1 & 2 are what I think they are the edge of them will be identical to a normal katana. It is just that they will have a much higher resistance to breaking and/or taking a set.
(To my knowledge HWS steel is fairly un-exotic steel of unspecified content, but with varied carbon content across the blade. So the edge should be the same as a regular sword, other areas with lower carbon)
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