Posted on 02/04/2024 8:56:59 AM PST by Eleutheria5
Step-by-step time-lapse video of how to make a Roman sword from what appears to be leaf stock.
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
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In before the Monty Python and the Holy Frail references.
Europeans used higher stock iron than Japanese smiths did. That’s why Japanese metal smiths had to fold their metal repeatedly to get the iron they wanted.
It’s not evidence that Japanese metal smiths were better.
I just thought I would throw that in there.
Grail. Damn autocorrect.
But even so, iron, even high-grade, is not steel. How did the Roman smiths make the transformation?
Romans used iron. They knew how to make steel, but having a steel sword was only something that they very upper classes would have had because of cost. If you had a steel sword, you had the Bughatti of swords.
Do the backyard smiths, who use weighted mallets to bang their product out rather than by hand, create better products?
So how did they make it for the upper class?
Your raciss iron supremacist post duly noted.
It was called the iron age, not the steel age.
That’s what I would like to know. The time may yet come when people have to do their own metallurgy in their back yards. And steal the coal from closed mines.
STEEL: From Start to Finish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l7JqonyoKA
OK. Now steel is the thing. How to make it in your backyard, other than the Japanese way.
Making steel is not hard, as a concept. You add carbon in the process, in the right amounts, until you get steel. I’ve seen Youtube videos where they pull the sword out of the forge and rub charcoal all over it before pounding it and they repeat this process until they get the right combination.
It probably took a long time to reheat, rub charcoal, and pound which is why it would have been expensive.
To avoid the Japanese, you start off with a higher class of iron than pig iron.
More like a modern interpretation of a gladius that doesn’t match any known historical pattern. The flared tip indicates a Mainz style but lacks the “waist”. The handle is certainly not true to period.
Cast Damascus Steel
“No one has replicated the original method of making Damascus steel because it was cast from wootz, a type of steel originally made in India over two thousand years ago. India began producing wootz well before the birth of Christ, but the weapons and other items made from wootz became truly popular in the 3rd and 4th century as trade items sold in the city of Damascus, in what is modern Syria”
https://www.thoughtco.com/damascus-steel-facts-608458
The repeated folding reduces the carbon content which is why Japanese smiths started with “pig iron”. What you end up with is still fairly good steel.
As a practical matter, an underground steelmaker will have to take a piece of rebar and make a steel sword out of it, using very crude tools. A forge and bellows, an anvil, hammer and tongs, safety goggles, heavy gloves and apron. Hardest thing to acquire would be coal.
I think they finally learned how in 2000. Paul Harvey did a segment on it.
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