Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Huh? Haven't you ever seen a blacksmith at work? A traditional blacksmith's forge has a fire with air forced through it with bellows, which were traditionally made from leather.
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... and operated by blacksmith's son or apprentice. This was the main responsibility of the lowest ranking apprentice. So you have to go back and make this the main labour for the son ;-)
In the good old times they used "forged steel". Forged steel isn't simply a piece of steel that you put into forge and than hit with a hammer on an anvil. Back then they weren't able to achieve temperatures high enough to actually melt the metal. So they produced "blooms" - chunks of raw iron - from primitive kilns and what they got was sponge-like material with high content of iron and lots of impurities (mostly slag). To get material good enough to make a sword they had to heat the material in a forge repeatedly and hit it with hammer again and again and again and again. This forging forced [most of] the slag out of metal and you achieved fine structure. Fine structure is really important for strength, because it prevents microscopic fractures from spreading through material.
If you want your smith to produce really, *really* fancy sword (today monetary equivalent of fancy car), let him make one of "damascene" or "damascus" steel. The process of making this steel was very closely guarded secret (and as it turned out recently, it required iron from a specific place in India(*)). So other manufacturers cheated. They took two bars of different material, hard and soft, forged them together, then forged and folded then many times, then twisted the resulting long bar and forged it again. The result was very specific structure that was very strong (not as strong as genuine damascus steel) and had very specific look. To get this look you had to grind the sword, then polish it and then etch it with acid.
Look here for modern approximation
http://www.mikov.cz/en/produkty/miko...-predator.html
See this nice page
http://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/ama...ed/t5_1_1.html
(*) at the very beginning of iron age India was producing most of the iron / steel in the world. So called wootz steel was very famous in its time.
I have a nice e-book about Damascus steel somewhere ... I will try to find it. In the meanwhile have a look at
http://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/ama.../key_role.html