[Rq-rules] [OT][General FRP]Riddle of Steel

[Sven Lugar]

You are quite right. This is a very detailed topic and hard to summarize 
as briefly as I did & be absolutely accurate. I was trying to give a 
"feel" & an overview so that it was readable. I'm glad there is someone 
with a deep enough understanding to regarding historical metallurgy to 
see the past the overview. I took no offense but rather, as you can see, 
I was happy to read your input. 100% pure iron is even rarer than 24 
carat gold because of it's binding properties and the very process of 
heating it in a primitive forge adds a certain element of carbon. Much 
of early iron was found as nodules in bogs that already had gone through 
a binding process (rusting into iron oxide or sulfates in the peat if 
nothing else) & weren't 100% pure iron. The earliest uses were just 
heated & hammered into a rough shape. All that aside, that incidental 
level of carbon produces a rather uneven & irregular quality of steel 
that for all intense & purposes counts as "iron". Quality steels such as 
found in Viking swords (high carbon layered against low-carbon- or 
"pure" iron for strength with flexibility) required more metallurgical 
knowledge (iron specific) than was present in bronze cultures and would 
take a bit of time & doesn't occur naturally. However, the meteor strike 
in Northern Europe left bits of high-grade nickel-iron steel in a great 
combination for making weapons scattered over the landscape. This was 
perfect for really high-grade weapons that wasn't to occur in a man-made 
form until after the invention of the blast furnace. I know smiths who 
still pay an arm, leg, & a testicle to get enough to make weapons out of 
meteoritic steel. May I recommend Jim Hrisoulas's books on sword making 
(He was a good teacher all those years ago)
Skol,
Sven

Bjorn Stolen wrote:
> Sorry if I seemed pedantic, I agree 100% to what you write here. The 
> spear is undisputedly the no.1 weapon, together with the shield in 
> viking times, and despite the fact that over 2000 vikingswords have 
> been found in Norway alone, the axe or the sword (depending on social 
> standing and personal preferences) was rather a back-up-weapon.
>
> I just thought that your initial post gave the impression that steel 
> wasn't "invented" until late medieval times, and I wanted to get 
> across that steel was invented as early as iron. It's actually 
> difficult to get 100% pure iron, as long as you heat it with coal, as 
> coal have carbon, and have a tendency to bind with iron under the 
> right circomstances, so allmost any iron item have some degree of 
> carbon in it, and the Iron Age should be regarded as an age where 
> different levels of steel took over for bronze, rather than an era 
> that can be subdivided into two sub-groups called "iron-age" and 
> "steel-age" IMHO.
>  
> One example in this from late medieval times, is why the controversy 
> on wether longbow-arrows could penentrate plate armor or not still 
> rages on. It's simply difficult to establish the relative hardness 
> between the arrowheads and the armor, as both were made from iron with 
> more or less carbon in it. I actually know about a smith that studyes 
> medieval blacksmithing, who have friends who dives on old shipwrecks 
> in search for old "iron" from pre-industrialized times, that they can 
> use for testing :)
>
> ...snip...
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