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Post by althesmith on Mar 30, 2024 22:56:00 GMT
No, this isn't a katana vs. longsword resuscitation. But related to that, some people seem to be under the impression that medieval swords, especially longsword, were essentially created out of high quality spring steel centuries before this was a thing. Hardness testing seems to show a wide variation going by the sources I can find so I would assume that the steel quality had quite a wide variability as well. I don't think that shear and double shear steel was a thing until the latter 1600s and even then there was a lot of variation going by Joseph Moxons work. So all in all, I don't think European swords had much of an edge, pardon the pun, in the 1400s over their Japanese counterparts when it came to steel quality.
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Post by AndiTheBarvarian on Mar 31, 2024 0:54:43 GMT
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Post by bwaze on Mar 31, 2024 7:15:19 GMT
This is a relevant study: The Sword and the Crucible: A History of the Metallurgy of European Swords up to the 16th Century: by Alan Williams (Author)
And even the results in here have their limitations. Testing hardness is a (slightly) destructive process, so you are usually limited to where or even if you can test the historically important artefacts. Also, it is very hard to exclude all the processes that were used on excavated swords and river finds - which are a majority of extant European swords. Was there heat used in restoring? Chemical, electrochemical processes that altered the surface? Alan Williams visited Slovenia, had a lecture here in our National museum, and he also tested many artefacts. And I know some presented real problems. Like for instance testing sword N4516, which Albion Ljubljana is a copy of. And that yielded unexpected results. The sword, by several testing results, is a soft iron one, no carbon, no heat treating! But we know it’s steel, because such a slender iron blade could be bent by just looking it wrong. But since it was found in 1832 in a river Ljubljanica the restoring is of course undocumented - is there a layer of electrolytically deposited iron that they used to improve the surface after they removed the corrosion and minerals from river deposition? I hope an article about these finds will be published soon.
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Post by althesmith on Mar 31, 2024 12:38:11 GMT
It's narrow but how thick is it? Flexibility is more an issue of cross section than alloy or heat treatment in my experience.
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Post by althesmith on Mar 31, 2024 13:28:43 GMT
Basically, a thick tapering mild steel bar provided at least the tip is relatively hard, which can be achieved by cold-forging, should perform perfectly adequately as a thrusting weapon.
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Post by mrstabby on Mar 31, 2024 14:39:48 GMT
Some blades that seem to be iron also might have been carburized. This would leave only a thin layer of steel on the surface with the core pure iron, and if enough grinding or corrosion happens the steel is gone. There are medieval examples.
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Post by bwaze on Mar 31, 2024 20:19:53 GMT
Basically, a thick tapering mild steel bar provided at least the tip is relatively hard, which can be achieved by cold-forging, should perform perfectly adequately as a thrusting weapon. It is a thick thrust oriented sword - but that still means relatively thin blade. And no, no knightly sword from 15th century was made from iron and only had thin layer of carburised steel, those techniques really apply to other weapons and tools. Of course being made from improper material could mean the sword could be fake. But it was really found in 1832, and was in a museum since then. And I think they established it is just a thin layer of pure iron on top of normal wrought tempered steel, and that layer isn’t original - since it also covers damaged portions of the blade. But I hope the article about it will be published soon.
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Post by durinnmcfurren on Mar 31, 2024 22:00:42 GMT
Where the Europeans had the advantage was in the quality of ore that they started with. The Japanese had mostly iron sand or something, so it tended to have a lot of inclusions, and required those fancy forging techniques to deal with the result. European steel didn't require this because while it had slag, it wasn't generally as bad.
Smiths from both regions knew how to pattern weld and how to fold steel. It just stopped being done in Europe because it was way more work than the payoff merited, in their estimation. The Japanese continued to use it, perhaps because the ore quality required it, perhaps because they valued the way it looked, probably a bit of both.
I'm oversimplifying here, but I think that's the gist of it.
Oh also the goals of the smiths were slightly different. The Japanese deliberately wanted a very hard edge, the Europeans seemed to have cared more about durability, etc.
And let's also keep in mind that both high and low quality steels have been found in both parts of the world.
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Post by bwaze on Apr 1, 2024 5:59:44 GMT
I think what set Europe apart after early Middle Ages is the scale of their steel production, and the scale of individual production centres. Water powered bellows for large bloomeries, water powered huge hammers for making large relatively homogenous ingots were introduced already in 12. and 13.th century. In the late Middle Ages the process of quenching steel and then separate process of tempering were well developed, even if they didn’t really understand the underlaying physics and chemistry - mass production of hardened steel armour is in my view even more impressive than being able to make a mono steel sword blades.
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Post by ranstone on Apr 5, 2024 22:51:17 GMT
Yes, some European style swords were fine springsteel, some were barely steel at all. The counter argument is no Japanese style swords were springsteel, but some were still quality, and some were also barely above iron.
Quality variants existed in both styles.
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