Quote:
Originally Posted by SF&F Reader
Sword and knife making has been a passion of mine since I was young.
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Very nicely said. You brought up points that none of us thought to mention
Quote:
Originally Posted by SF&F Reader
There could be the master smith (who directs the hammering), the apprentices who do the actual hammering (usually two),
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This is often done the way that master smith has a small hammer (relatively speaking, of course) and where he hits two apprentices have to hit with much bigger hammers. The most difficult part for me (when learning practical blacksmithing) was, that when working as an apprentice or blacksmith assistant you have to continue hammering the same spot even when master smith stops hitting the spot. Master smith signals his apprentices that they have to stop by "ringing the anvil" - hitting it in a peculiar way so that his hammer goes up and down rapidly. When he wants you to start hitting different spot he would hit it with hammer. That can be quite difficult and requires expert timing so he doesn't collide with helpers hammer.
Also, one little observation for the sake of the completeness of this thread.
When people ran out of trees for making charcoal (gross oversimplification), and when it became clear that iron production can't be sustained by wood based charcoal, use of coke has been invented in 17th century. Of course, Chinese have been doing that for 800 years by then ;-)
Coke is produced in a very similar process as charcoal - by baking coal (instead of wood) in air-less oven.