The Hobbit Hole VIII - Still round the corner we may meet...

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[HairOfTheDog]

Welcome to The Hobbit Hole!

Still round the corner we may meet...

• First thread: New Zealander builds Hobbit hole
• Second thread: The New Hobbit Hole
• Third thread: The Hobbit Hole III - Journey to the Cross-roads! (Congratulations, we filled it up!)
• Fourth Thread: The Hobbit Hole IV - The Road Goes Ever On...
• Fifth Thread: The Hobbit Hole V - Where Many Paths and Errands Meet...
• Sixth Thread: The Hobbit Hole VI - And Whither Then? I Cannot Say...
• Seventh Thread: The Hobbit Hole VII - But not yet weary are our feet...

New verse:

Upon the hearth the fire is red, Beneath the roof there is a bed; But not yet weary are our feet, Still round the corner we may meet A sudden tree or standing stone That none have seen but we alone. Tree and flower and leaf and grass, Let them pass! Let them pass! Hill and water under sky, Pass them by! Pass them by!

Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gate, And though we pass them by today, Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun. Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe, Let them go! Let them go! Sand and stone and pool and dell, Fare you well! Fare you well!

Home is behind, the world ahead, And there are many paths to tread Through shadows to the edge of night, Until the stars are all alight. Then world behind and home ahead, We’ll wander back to home and bed. Mist and twilight, cloud and shade, Away shall fade! Away shall fade! Fire and lamp, and meat and bread, And then to bed! And then to bed!

See also: http://freeper.the-hobbit-hole.net

Web page for our moot reports and troop support information!

[Fedora]

Those things do tend to be expensive! But hopefully if I find a model I like I may be able to find a cheaper price--my friend can get martial arts equipment wholesale; I don't know if he can get katanas but I'll ask.

Glad to see you in the Hole again! :)

[Fedora]

So, I bothered Fedora on another thread and wandered back this way.

The Shire has a way of calling you back! :)

[Fedora]

It's really weird. Really really weird. I'm glad at least most of the Hobbit Hole have met each other - you and Fedora are about the only ones who still might be cross-dressers or mad axe-men.

I never crossed no dressers or axed no men! Dropped a few eaves, maybe, and heard something I didn't rightly understand about the end of the world and all; but that's it!

[JenB]

You have either a reply, or three, or none - had a momentary internet slowage here.

[Darksheare]

Mad axe-man more likely.
Though there are rumors that I really am th devil, thanks to my former military unit and one certain seoldier there saying, "Keller, you're Satan, aren't ya? You're just way too NICE."

Though I DID take the time to stick a recent post-military service pic of me up on my bio page.
Even though said bio page is half reality half joke.
*snort*
So, should you wander onto the bio page, just be aware that the text is a joke, but the pics and ping lists are real.

[Fedora]

You have either a reply, or three, or none

Three replies for the Elven-Kings under the sky! :) You have one reply that looks like it just went through :)

[Darksheare]

Good to be back here.

I like stuff in Damascus steel, but Damascus doesn't make for a good Katana blade.
Neither does Wootz steel, but that's minor side problems.

The layering visible on some of Bugei's stuff is what drew me to check that site out in the first place.
Usually what some places get as Katanas are Iato practice swords with nickel aluminum blades- which really annoys me to the extreme.

If I get my hands on something that has a blade on it, it had better be functional.

[Darksheare]

Always.
Kinda like the flat part of Ohio calls to you if you were born there.
Really weird...

[Fedora]

The other two copies of your reply just popped in, so I did end up getting three after all :)

[Fedora]

Yeah, I know what you mean. I bought a Tai Chi blade once only to learn it wasn't sharp--grrrrrr. . . But right now I'm looking for something to practice with, so I'm more interested in proper grip, length, and balance than sharpness. My friend was showing me some Aikido sword drills that I've been practicing on my staff, want to pick up a blade to try them with eventually.

[Fedora]

I've never seen the flat part of Ohio. Is that at all like the flat part of Illinois?--I've seen that. Only time I've been through Ohio was on a class trip to Washington DC and on the way from Milwaukee we drove through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. I didn't get to see much of Ohio, though--as I recall we stopped at a trucker stop for food and my friend and I played Galaxian or Galaga or some such video game :) I do want to see the museums there sometime, though--lots of neat stuff I've heard. My parents visited the Sea World there once and told me it was neat.

[Darksheare]

Have a 'ha-ha' katana with a "440 stainless" blade.
Horribly unbalanced, grip is too short for proper handling, and the blade isn't full tang but one of those welded screw stud types.
BUT, should someone be stupid enough to break in, it's the quietest thing I have.
Kindest as well.
Not having been to Illinois, I cannot say whether it is similar or not.
But the roads are more or less in straight lines, trees here and there, farms and fields, train tracks, and flat for as far as you can see in every direction.
(Bradner, Ohio area.)
Sometimes you can sit and watch rain storms cross the road far ahead of you while driving.

[Fedora]

Yep, that sounds like the flat part of Illinois :)

I'd take an unbalanced katana over no katana anyday! :) As for items if someone should break in, apart from firearms I keep these stored at various strategic points throughout the house:

6-foot staff
4-foot staff
Nunchaku
Escrima sticks
Butterfly Swords
Butterfly Knife
Throwing Knife
Throwing Darts
Throwing Stars

and of course, my most recent acquisition,

Hobbit Hole Knife :)

[Fedora]

BTW I'm about to head out for about an hour and a half or so, so I'll talk to you more a bit later--good talking to ya! :)

[Darksheare]

OKers, see you when you get back.
The only throwing darts I have are heavy all metal deals from my 'lost in the move' dartboard.
Not that the dartboard stopped the things from going through it.

[Overtaxed]

Shoot NASCAR.com lied! The Busch race is on FOX. Right now it's lap 15.

We don't have to wait for no steenkin' one-lap horse race!

[RosieCotton]

Rosie, I like that picture a lot... grin...

So do I! I saved it for future reference...

Went birthday shopping for my sister today and ended up mostly with stuff for me. Oops...

Found a brand new dress at the thrift shop that looks really good on me, for one.

And it's a size 10, though I'm thinkin' it's big for that size...but it's still nice to see that number on it. ;-)

[RosieCotton]

And now we're gonna watch Master and Commander, which I haven't seen yet.

And I'm making lemon pepper chicken for dinner, with fresh green beans with butter and dill, and bell pepper and celery and onion dip.

Life is good!

[300winmag]

Do you know anything about how the various ancient/medieval methods of forging swords compare and whether there are any methods which seem more similar to the Japanese method than others?

Apparently steel-making was getting a foothold in Europe by the 1100s, at least. Testing of armor from the Agincourt era showed that it was equivalent of modern mild hot-rolled steel. The famous armor-piercing arrows of the English archers could not penetrate steel armor at the range they were deployed. For knights, that is. Horse armor was still iron, and it seems the dead and dying horses are what really messed up the French cavalry.

Most blacksmiths by then knew that lots of forging, folding, and hammering would beat out most of the impurities, leaving a very hard piece of metal (I don't think they yet had a concept of "steel") that would also break easily. I think they stopped before reaching that point, because European swords of that era were for thrusting and pounding, but not slicing.

The big breakthrough in Japanese swords, IMHO, was their discovery of differential heat treating. They could forge a steel to a high degree of purity, and then harden it. The clay coating used to make the hamon, or temper line, protected the extremely hard edge during tempering, where slow heating to a medium heat, followed by a slow cooling, relaxed the crystal structure in the body of the blade, while preventing the hardness of the edge from being drawn.

I'm not sure if any other culture had both hand-folded steel plus a differential temper. The industrial age made steel common, but "high performance" steel was still expensive because of trace elements like chromium, vanadium, manganese, etc. needed to be closely controlled, and some of them don't get along well with basic iron.

Nickel has some valuable properties, but is hard to control in the steel. One recent method of making "designer steel" is the CPM or "crucible powdered metal" method. There, molten ingredients are sprayed from separate nozzles at the same time, where they cool at the rate of about a million degrees per second. The result in an ingot with all the materials distributed the way you want them, incuding ones like nickel, which doesn't "play nice". A metallusrgist can pretty much design the properties he wants in the metal.

[HairOfTheDog]

Afternoon all - tunin' in for the derby... Can't function on Ramius's laptop. Not sure how you guys manage without a mouse!