|
Post by darknovashin on Jan 7, 2024 21:07:52 GMT
We've strayed a bit from the original topics at this point, but I had a thought of how to present the information we have glossed over so far and figured I would try to lay it out again in a summary so far with my opinions baked in:
First, the desirable characteristics of a sword greatly depend on your planned use, often a balance of edge retention and toughness. This is especially important when talking about tameshigiri or similar heavy cutting practice vs light cutting vs sparring vs historical combat vs artistic admiration. The katana isn't a god tier sword, nothing excels in all these aspects. The katana, like all weapons, is a compromise design based on the available materials and the uses it was applied to.
Tamehagane is a crappy base material for a sword, this isn't debated even among historical smiths. On its own, tamehagane is an impressive refinement of the base material, iron sand, but falls short of other steels even when looking at contemporary sources. The solution the smiths of that era came upon was a combination of forge folding to unify the carbon content of the base material which comes out quite patchy, and, in some cases, using pattern welding to better control the characteristics of the metal they wanted in the geometry of the sword. One of the most basic examples is the "sanmei" or 3 layer construction seen in multiple eras and locations across the world with hardened steel at the edge and a softer steel in the other areas. For this first topic, this boils down to do you want a sword that is tough and will survive both strain from poorly angled and poorly controlled cuts and blocks vs a sword optimized for some combination of offensive uses between cutting, thrusting, or in some cases, straight out bashing. This will play a role in the geometry of the blade and how that interacts with the material being used.
For example, an epee de combat is thrusting focused with a very thin blade since typical uses did not involve armor compared to an estoc with a stouter but still point only blade meant to punch through weak points in heavily armored opponents. Both types typically sacrifice edge retention (if they had edges at all) for toughness compared to a katana that focuses heavily on a sharp edge and sacrifices toughness as the differential hardening increases the likelihood of taking a bend. Oakeshott typology is a great way to look at how blades evolve to the conditions of combat over time. I do not know of a similar breakdown for katana, but there is a decidedly wider range of katana types than is generally appreciated.
From the older Tachi, which started as long and heavy weapons used as calvary side arms, to the later era katana of the Edo period where the most likely combat trended towards unarmored, and so the blades generally became straighter, lighter and with longer kissaki to allow in part for better thrusts. Not unlike small swords, the swords of the time changed to the uses, sometimes cutting down and re-profiling older blades to match as well. This is a generalization of course, but it provides a basis to understanding why some shapes are better for specific uses. The hira zukuri profile became well known for its extreme cutting ability with thin, broad blades and is still popular today with tameshigiri practitioners, which will come up again in a bit.
Second, the metal used for the weapon is almost always iron or steel. Despite some overlap where high quality bronze was superior to iron prior to the understanding of how to make and temper steel, this has remained unchanged for over two millennia. By some amount of luck and abundance, iron has the broad range of characteristics to make a good weapon material between its availability, workability, and variety. Some early weapons show spring tempers and/or hardened edges far before the process is generally considered to be understood, but it was obviously understood enough to be repeatable (if difficult). More modern metallurgy has explained the mechanism behind how to refine iron ores into steel by removing and, in some cases adding, impurities, but even in early China, the basics were being applied by the stir-fry method. As mentioned, tamehagane is considered a very poor quality iron at its base. Refined via furnace, the iron is allowed to pool and harden at random, producing a mix of carbon contents. Traditional smiths have learned to separate out the different carbon contents through look, sound, and other methods to pick which pieces to start with for their desired outcome, then forge weld and fold them 10-15 times to better even out the carbon content into something that can be reliably heat treated and tempered.
Knifesteelnerds is a great resource here as, even if primarily focused on knives and steel, the same applies to swords, even if the desired characteristics might be different. They recently did a study of different Damascus steel types including a billet folded to the 3000 layer range (about the equivalent of 11 folds). At that level, the steel of each layer has sufficiently thinned for the heat of a forge to allow for diffusion of different elements between layers to the point it is effectively a new homogenous steel. In modern steels, this ceases to be desirable as they are, as a whole, generally optimized for specific characteristics requiring careful balances of carbon to other impurities. Allowing them to mix with another steel with different characteristics just generally will produce an inferior result, particularly in the sizes of carbides. But while using tamehagane, it let the smith create a unified steel to work with and heat treat reliably.
Third, as mentioned, steel can have a variety of characteristics. Literally hundreds if not thousands of years of effort has been spent trying to find a better steel. The improved understanding of metallurgy has accelerated this process in the modern era, allowing for both prediction of characteristics before testing as manipulation of the qualities of steel beyond just its chemical composition. Additives like vanadium further increase the hardness of the carbides, while molybendium can improve toughness, and chromium can improve corrosion resistance. Powder metallurgy, on the other hand, is one of these process advancements. By effectively atomizing a metal alloy then refusing it into a single piece, the size of the carbides of the metal are further reduced, allowing for a steel that retains more of it's toughness for a given amount of edge retention. You can make some truly incredible increases in properties with these techniques, doubling them or more. But it does still remain a compromise: Vanadium carbide is brittle, Chromium carbide takes carbon away from the iron and reduces hardness of the surrounding material, etc.
Shock absorbent steels like S5 and S7 are extremely tough to the point of being nearly unbreakable by human-generated forces if they are properly heat treated, but their edge retention suffers for it. Given the size of swords, resharpening is a significant undertaking, particularly if you are aiming for the artistic level of polish you see on katana, but you don't need to hold a razor edge to cut with a sword due to the mass and techniques used. This differs a bit from a knife where minute edge wear, chips and rolls will make significant changes in usability.
Paper cutting sharp is often used as a baseline test, but that can be a mix of a fine edge as well as the ability of it to "bite." "Hair popping" sharp or razor sharp is a bit past that and usually isn't necessary for a sword. Instead, "paper cutting" is more useful as a test of how consistent the sharpening is and a good marker of your own technique. Full cuts through having paper are a great way to get feedback on your edge alignment and control. But, as a result, edge retention on the level of CPM3V and other powder metallurgy steels can be a bit overkill for swords, though still useful. CPM3V was cited several times in this topic and it does truly have some awesome characteristics, but it's not indestructible and falls short of other "super" steels in their own areas of specialty. Its claim to fame is being able to have as much toughness as it does without sacrificing as much edge retention of other materials. CPM Magnacut takes that a step further and allows for high corrosion resistance along with high edge retention and toughness. These modern steels are great, but even they have to be properly heat treated to make the most of their special characteristics.
Fourth, the heat treatment of the steel is often more important than its composition alone. Many of the higher end "super" steels depend on careful heat treatment to maintain their properties. As mentioned, the advantage of powder metallurgy sits in its particle size control, something you can lose if you mess up the tempering and heat treatment. This was also true historically. Part of the fame of swords to put up to abuse and/or cut through targets boiled down to the heat treatment over the source of their iron since, in general, the differences between crucible steel produced in medieval Toledo, Spain and the stir-fried iron of Han China isn't gigantic since both where just removing as many impurities as possible, not understanding exactly why it helped. Japan, with its lower quality and quantity of mineral resources to its neighbors, focused extremely heavily on any method to improve the function of its swords.
Differential hardening allowed them to have a hard edge for sharpness and retention with a more flexible back to prevent the sword from snapping straight through. The trade off was that if the blade bent passed a certain point, it would easily take a "set" where the hardened edge would stay bent rather than flexing back as in a through, spring hardened blade. While spring tempering was known in China in that era, spring tempering of tamehagane isn't really seen to my knowledge. This is likely from the difficulty of getting the whole blade to state where it can be spring tempered and hold a reliable edge from such a heterogeneous starting material, but that's mostly my own conjecture. Chinese steel was imported as a superior option for katana at several points in history which may indicate an acknowledgment of that limitation, though, in turn, Japanese blades were adopted by Chinese military leaders in an acknowledgment of their effectiveness in combat owing to the skills of the smiths.
Within Japan, the width of the Hamon was also known to dictate allot of the sword's properties. Keeping a bigger part of the blade as the tougher material (1/3:2/3 has been mentioned to me before from a couple sources) provided better properties in combat as the edge was less likely to catastrophically chip and fail with a crack through to the spine. The thinner suguha Hamon was technically more difficult than the more flamboyant, broader Hamon, but it was also respected as the more practical choice likely for this reason and admired in its simplicity. In the modern era, I can refer to Forged in Fire and Matthew Jensen as good examples of why, even with the same starting material, the quality of the heat treatment can make such a difference in performance, and Knifesteelnerds has done multiple, detailed breakdowns of how even differences of 50-100 degrees celsius in the temper can lead to drastic changes in material properties. But heat treatment isn't everything in performance, it just maximizes the performance of the base alloy.
Fifth, blade geometry is just as optimization heavy for use as the material, possibly more so. Competition cutting, both of swords and knives, is a great way to see this in action. Knife or Death, though it only ran for 2 seasons, demonstrated some of the advantages and limitations of blades against specific targets (and how technique was important to extending those limits) to a wide audience in a way that would be difficult to repeat. Broad, thin blades will cut through light and medium targets with ease while thicker blades will shrug off harder targets without edge damage.
The Alexandria sword pattern is popular with sword cutting competitors to the point where it's referenced as a standard. The Oakeshott XVIIIc is a triangular, broad based blade with a very thin profile and extended bevel. It allows for an incredibly fine edge with sufficient mass behind it to cut through soft and medium targets while its thin cross section minimizes resistance while passing through the target. This is mirrored in the hira zukuri profile of katana, though single edged, with a continuous bevel from back to front and, typically, a very thin but broad blade. The oxtail dao in china is a similar construction as well with a broad single bevel on a thin blade. The Alexandria swords are spring tempered, even the originals from the 15th century, as are oxtail dao. Historical Hira Zukuri are differentially hardened like all katana. Yet all chose this similar geometry for similar purposes of optimization. There are some spectacularly complex geometries in historical blades to better improve performance such as in the Ribaldo (Oakeshott XIX) and Unokobi zukuri.
Weight total, weight distribution, stiffness, and nodes of percussion can all be manipulated with this geometry. Peter Johnson is the recognized expert of this and his work led to the development of the weapon dynamics calculator by Vincent Le Chevalier, but there is still allot of work to be done to fully understand how this interacts with cutting and, unless I am missing a more recent development, fullers and more advanced manipulation of cross sections. The calculator can account for physical properties of the final blade with nodes of percussion, but can't tell you how much length and depth of a fuller to plan for to produce a desired result. Historical smiths may not have fully understood the math and chemistry behind what they were doing, but their experience allowed them to exceed the limitations of their materials.
Sixth, techniques play a part in all of this. You can't use a long sword like a katana nor vice versa. Their techniques share many, many similarities since they all have to obey the rules of the human body, but they also optimized for different uses, including the weapon itself. Sellsword arts in one of his shorts made a comment of how difficult it was at first to swap to cutting with a katana when he was used to a longsword, but he figured it out with some practice. Put simply, a straight blade and a curved blade handle differently in the cut and deal with slightly different forces. Katana techniques do allot to preserve the hardened edges of their weapon, heavily focused on deflection parries and relatively few techniques dealing with edge on edge binds, where as the "wind and bind" is a common refrain among HEMA longsword demonstrations. I will use a Jian differently than a Katana or a saber, all 3 of which I have at least some training in. This means what I want for each is different, though I do freely steal techniques from one to use with another where they can be. Again, generalities, but they do affect what you want in a sword. And this is one of the ways "modern tactical" swords often fail by focusing on one aspect to the exclusion of others.
Seventh, putting it all together, when comparing sword makers such as between Howard Clark and Motohara, you aren't looking just at the steel composition. While Howard Clark's Bainite construction is a really useful manipulation of material properties relating to heat treatments within a single steel composition and CPM3V is a modern metallurgist's answer to optimizing for a tough blade that will hold an edge, they're only part of the equation. This has been hit on repeatedly in this discussion.
The skill of your smith in the shaping and heat treatment of the blade will determine the basics of its performance in handling, durability, edge retention, and, to a lesser extent of usefulness, corrosion resistance. The refinement of the geometry and your technique will be what actually determines how well the blade will cut. Motohara has spent years of technique and testing to maximize what they can get out of their geometries for Toyama Ryu Batto Do first and foremost. That is why you order from them for a competition cutter. They similarly optimize their use of steels to support these geometries with quality heat treatments and provide high end fittings that will look great and stand up to the forces involved. CPM 3V is a newer metal for them, but I trust their quality control (and pride) to get the heat treatments done well. The result here then is a tough as nails blade that will maintain an edge for fair longer than would be expected for that level of toughness.
Howard Clark is a recognized ABS Mastersmith, one of only 114 currently recognized in the US. For those not familiar, that certification takes years of effort and testing both on artistic skill and functional durability. He has spent literal decades smithing katana in a variety of geometries and has a reputation for both their beauty and durability. He primarily works in L6 and 1086 steels with the former for durability and the latter for artistic appreciation, but neither will lack in the department you did not choose them for. While he no longer does fittings and polishing for his own blades, he recommends 3 specific craftsmen for them (Tenold, Demasa, Boomershine), and applauds their work and has also sent his own work to Motohara, so the quality of fit and finish will depend more on the money and time spent on the piece than any property of the material (though notably, an especially poor polishing or fitting job can wreck heat treatment). But, he understands the limits of his blades better than anyone with those same decades of feedback. He will advise you on your geometries if you ask him and freely lets you know that even the L6 bainite he forges has it's limitations. If you want to make a competition level cutter, take advantage of the Bainite's toughness with a thin, broad blade with a single bevel just as it is done with competition cutting, and he will know how thin of a blade he can get away with.
Hardened L6 is not going to hold as good of an edge as an optimized modern steel focused on vanadium carbides, but the harder Rockwell L6 will actually get closer than one might expect if you have a well constructed edge. It's very difficult to compare raw numbers here due to the combination of difficulty in separating hardness's effect on edge retention vs carbides vs geometry, so going with the experience of practitioners using the swords is the more useful data here. The rule of thumb seems to be that the edge will blunt over time, but a good geometry and technique used will keep the blade cutting through mats just fine with only needing minimal touching up. Better still, the toughness from the bainitic spine means that the added force put on the blade from having a less sharp edge due to incomplete or deflected cuts is less likely to take a set and need more significant touch up than other differentially hardened blades.
Finding hard numbers of Bainite toughness is also difficult due to bainite being notoriously time consuming to make to test and the varying quality of bainite between makers, generally measured as a % Bainitic structure. Adding in what specific steel alloy base you are using to make the Bainite would further complicate things as each impurity is going to effect the part of the TTT curve you can form bainite at and, in turn, the properties you can retain from the more complex alloys. While you could form Bainite with CPM metals, you are likely going to lose many of the properties you wanted to use them for as the Bainite structure is a separate formation from your carbides which CPM metals focus allot of effort on maintaining.
The only examples I managed to find of hard numbers in notch testing puts the Bainite and CPM 3V on roughly the same levels of shock toughness (both incidentally loosing out to S7), I can't confirm the heat treat on either for % banitic composition for the bainite sample or hardness, which matters more on the CPM3V sample as a lower hardness CPM3V is not going to able to be taken to as good of an edge as a higher hardness, though it would hold it well due to the vanadium carbides. As a newer metal with a more complex heat treatment, finding accounts to compare to of CPM 3V's function as a sword over time is also trickier.
This is actually partly why MagnaCut interests me a a potential sword metal, Knifesteelnerds, who designed and developed it, actually has laid out nearly all of its properties while he was testing it, something I don't have for CPM 3V though he did also do allot of testing on that. Curiously, MagnaCut, by my reading of the charts at least, might be able to be differentially hardened to eek out a bit more performance in a katana blade, though I don't have enough experience to work out how to do that heat treatment or even if it would be worth it. Going back to Bainite, I will again reference Alientude's review of a Howard Clark blade that spent years as the competition loaner for a dojo. That blade has likely seen more mats and bad cuts than any one person has done and remained intact. It's an incredible testament to durability.
And even with all the bells and whistles, swords can still fail and take damage, particularly when used outside the use they were optimized for. Bottle caps are notoriously damaging during backyard cutting. Unfortunately it's hard to convert between hardness scales for plastics and steel, but from my limited findings of examples, plastics can get up to the Mohs scale of 4 and HRC of 16 or so vs the mohs of 5-7 of steel. Again, things vary, but bottle caps get into the range of some stones and even cast iron in hardness rather than flesh and living bone, so it's not entirely surprising to see thinner edges optimized for tatami taking rolls or even chips. More niku is what will help most with these harder targets, not steel type though steel type can improve the wear resistance of the edge (going back to carbides again).
Cuts into heavy targets like stands, meat (like whole pigs), and multi-roll tatami are more likely to lead to bends and sets. The heavier weight of the material and longer distance to pass through the material is going to push the edge and blade around much more as the weapon travels through and the impact causes shifts in the target. Speed and technique help allot here as the faster the weapon travels through, the less time for forces to act on it, and, the straighter the path stays, the less torque that can be applied to the blade. The type of steel and quality of steel does play a major role here which is why poorly heat treated steels might bend or even snap, though this is moving Into the range of abusive testing, pushing the limits of the blade rather than staying within the ranges the blade typically was made for.
Lancelot Chan has a number of good slow motion videos of blades passing through quite heavy newspaper and PVC targets used as limb stand-ins and really demonstrates the forces put on blades in a cut and how much technique can also play a role. A sword, again depending on era, is meant to cut through flesh and sometimes living bone plus or minus some amount of armor, and armor tended to be dealt with by thrusts between gaps in said armor rather than directly through the metal. Intentionally limb hewing cuts are relatively rarer in historical combat styles, partly as it's more efficient to deliver cut through softer tissue that's just as lethal or disabling rather that committing that amount of energy outside of a finishing blow with a single opponent. Pushing a blade to cut stone (or its plastic equivalent), dried wood, metal, etc, is not typical use for such tools and so a weapon designed for the former stands a chance to fail on the latter simply from its structure regardless of material. Some combat styles ultimately abandoned the slash in favor of thrusts to penetrate armor, others switched to heavy, bashing strikes that would pass through armor or splinter wooden hafts of polearms, and those choices were reflected in the type of blade shape and geometry to improve the chance of success and minimize risk of catastrophic failure.
When you purchase a sword, you are paying a craftsman to make you a tool. They will be able to optimize to that purpose based on their own knowledge and skill. What the bells and whistles of going to Motohara, Howard Clark, and other high end craftsman buy you is the certainty that they know the limits of their construction and will provide you the best heat treat and geometry (and, potentially, the best artistic details). But they are still going to make you a weapon based on the constraints of what you ask them for and no amount of specialized material will make a weapon that will be able to perform a different task than the started goal, and all swords make an assumption of an ultimately soft human target, though potentially in a crunchy armor shell. For a soft, human target, a well-sharpened piece of raw iron will still cut, whereas a rod of CPM3V or Bainite will not, though that's a "reduce to absurdity" comparison.
In a less extreme and better recent historical example, Bob Engarth was one of the first American bladesmiths to tackle making katana. He used 1050 for most of his blades as he could form them on a belt sander before the differential hardening and heat treatment, something generally looked down upon as a material nowadays when offered. But, he experimented and learned how to maximize what he could do with the materials on hand, using muneyaki (tempering the base of the back of the blade) and making broader bases to make them more resilient to taking bends than the material would otherwise allow and created very respectably performing blades still valued for their artistic expression today. Very few people will take an antique sword to pool noodle/water bottle/newspaper/pvc/tatami and risk their damage or failure, acknowledging the general improvement in metallurgy overshadows their willingness to trust poorer quality steel from high level smiths (also the ability to acquire replacement notwithstanding). But, the difference of modern steels from modern smiths really comes down to a high end steel will buy you a potentially a more durable end product. This is of course assuming the craftsman knows how to maximize it in the same way a historical smith did for their lesser quality steels. If you trust the expertise of your smith in the metal they are working with, you are going to get what you are looking for.
On a more personal note, I have not cut with my Howard Clark blades yet. I plan to keep aside the ones with an artistic level of polish from Josiah Boomershine and use the one that isn't as highly touched up, possibly Keith Larman or Fred Lohman which is a bit unclear in the provenance... once I retrain a bit using an extra thick S5 Cloudhammer for heavy targets and Motohara LMC for Tatami. It's unfortunately been nearly 2 decades now since I did any Toyama Ryu and it wasn't our main focus, just a yearly or so seminar. Also, COVID is a b**** and my health has been on the recovery for coming on 4 years now. While I am certain the Howard Clark will take the abuse of my atrophied technique and muscle, I want to pay respect to the higher quality blade with better skills than I have currently.
|
|
|
Post by takitam on Jan 7, 2024 21:39:47 GMT
I tend to write overly long posts sometimes, but you have me beaten by a mile I have read a few paragraphs and it feels like a quality post. Do you think you could edit it and split your paragraphs into shorter ones? It is much easier on the eyes this way, when you are reading on a wide computer screen. This post made me understand the TL,DR crowd Thank you. That was a brilliant post. Very 'dense' but a great summary of (I suspect) years of interest in the hobby. I also envy your ability to focus on issues without any emotional involvement. This is something I am still trying to learn. I am not as enthusiastic about the use of steels like 3V or Magnacut in swords. My prediction is that they will not prove to be better than simple carbon steels with quality HT. Mostly because every chromium and Vanadium carbide steel I have used in knives proved to be a lot more prone to microchipping than well tempered carbon steels. (At lower HRC they might be as good as carbon steels but at that point they would also lose the wear resistance which is their selling point.) They were designed for different purposes and nobody designs steels for swords nowadays Even if they would, it is hard to imagine how they could be better than what we already have. Besides, like you wrote in your post, there are several factors which are more important than steel when making a quality sword. And these are still a mystery to probably all entry level and quite a few high-end swordmakers. I mean in European sword replicas, I don't know the market for Japanese sword repros.
|
|
|
Post by Lord Newport on Jan 9, 2024 7:25:37 GMT
I I am not as enthusiastic about the use of steels like 3V or Magnacut in swords. My prediction is that they will not prove to be better than simple carbon steels with quality HT. Mostly because every chromium and Vanadium carbide steel I have used in knives proved to be a lot more prone to microchipping than well tempered carbon steels. (At lower HRC they might be as good as carbon steels but at that point they would also lose the wear resistance which is their selling point.) They were designed for different purposes and nobody designs steels for swords nowadays Even if they would, it is hard to imagine how they could be better than what we already have. Besides, like you wrote in your post, there are several factors which are more important than steel when making a quality sword. And these are still a mystery to probably all entry level and quite a few high-end swordmakers. I mean in European sword replicas, I don't know the market for Japanese sword repros. The real issue is that no one makes swords for what their original design/intent was...So its all an intellectual exercise well suited to keyboard warrior discussion.
|
|
mrstabby
Member
Posts: 1,196
Member is Online
|
Post by mrstabby on Jan 9, 2024 14:54:06 GMT
I I am not as enthusiastic about the use of steels like 3V or Magnacut in swords. My prediction is that they will not prove to be better than simple carbon steels with quality HT. Mostly because every chromium and Vanadium carbide steel I have used in knives proved to be a lot more prone to microchipping than well tempered carbon steels. (At lower HRC they might be as good as carbon steels but at that point they would also lose the wear resistance which is their selling point.) They were designed for different purposes and nobody designs steels for swords nowadays Even if they would, it is hard to imagine how they could be better than what we already have. Besides, like you wrote in your post, there are several factors which are more important than steel when making a quality sword. And these are still a mystery to probably all entry level and quite a few high-end swordmakers. I mean in European sword replicas, I don't know the market for Japanese sword repros. The real issue is that no one makes swords for what their original design/intent was...So its all an intellectual exercise well suited to keyboard warrior discussion. True, though some still try to make something that handles alike.
I am still interested how these modern steels would behave in swords even when they're not tweaked for that. Would the added edge retention and corrosion resistance outweigh the cons of the steel, Magnacut would be a lot harder to sharpen or reprofile than any carbon steel (you probably need to go for diamond abrasives). The wear resistance loss for lower hardness seems to be linear with Magnacut (also most other steels, info from knifesteelnerds), so even at 50HRC you would not even come down close to the best carbon steels. Microchipping could be an issue, since it is not only dependant on hardness but also on the carbide size. Many reviews only seem to concentrate on toughness with 3V and Bainite swords, but I have not yet seen how the edge holds up, can you cut significantly more with it or only a few percent? I have seen a 3V knife compared to SK5, and there seems to be a lot of difference how the edge survives strikes, but that's for knives around 58HRC. Because if the edge retention for something like Magnacut would not really make a difference, the only real positive remaining would be corrosion sesistance.
For now, it's not feasible for me to even try to get a "supersteel" sword because of the price, but I'd surely love the chance to test one out. Even something in relatively low-end 14C28N would interest me, doesn't have to be 3v or Magnacut.
|
|
|
Post by jyamada on Jan 10, 2024 1:22:47 GMT
I might have missed an announcement but I don't see Motohara offering CPM3V in their blades unless they haven't updated their website. SKS3 (O1?). L6. SGT (also similar to O1). SK3 (high carbon, some Mn, and a bit of Si and Cr) and D2. This has been a great thread besides some of the obvious stupid semprini some posters said lol. Circling back to L6, from what I've read, the chemical composition lends itself to creating bainite structures besides whatever Howard Clark is working his to do his magick Same with S5 academic.oup.com/mam/article-abstract/3/S2/691/6928275 They don't use SKS3 or L6 anymore. SGT is used for most of the customer orders. Their customers are mostly all trained practitioners that heavily use, and not abuse, their swords, so SGT is more than enough for extensive usage on bamboo, used Japanese tatami omote, and softer easier mats . They also do stuff in SK3, D2, CPM 3V, and M4. The bulk of their sales are through referrals, and Jason works directly with customers to spec blade and koshirae. The website and other social media pages are to provide contact and general information for customers (mostly JSA practitioners), and display current work examples.
|
|
|
Post by shinobigatana on Jan 16, 2024 6:38:58 GMT
The real issue is that no one makes swords for what their original design/intent was...So its all an intellectual exercise well suited to keyboard warrior discussion. This is an excellent statement. That said, there is little difference in making a sword for combat and making one for artistic expression. I have had conversations with many smiths both american and japanese over the years and they all say the same thing when describing their craft. The first rule is to make a weapon that can actually be used, the baseline is functionality. Many of the blades I have had made were never initially put into art polish because I wanted the opportunity to actually use them. This wasn't because they were made from some fancy steel with Blah blah % of this and that, but because a properly made blade allows you to make the most of your specific training style. This is the main advantage of owning a true custom blade. The length, geometry and curvature are specific to each of us. Just my .02
|
|