Re: Spike TV's analysis of The Deadliest Warriors: do you agree?
All Steel is Iron and Carbon. Some Damascus made blades did come from trace ores that could make it
Superior
but the techniques for its making died out around 1700 after the principal sources of special ores needed for its production were depleted.
Those sources contained trace amounts of tungsten and/or vanadium which other sources did not but other than that it's mostly all the same really.
The only difference is how much iron to carbon and how you work it.
For sword building the Japanese just used a better method, two of them really.
Sword makers could make steel very hard so that it would hold a sharp edge. However, making steel very hard also made it very brittle and often in battle a sword would be broken if hit just right against another sword or object. The sword makers knew how to make soft steel that would be less brittle and would not break in battle. However soft steel would not hold a sharp edge and it would quickly dull in battle and would not be able to cut through armor or hack of limbs and heads as a good sword was expected to do.
One way the Japanese sword makers solved the problem was to hammer together layers of steel of varying hardness welding them into a metal sandwich. This sandwich of metal layers was then reheated, folded back on itself and hammered out thin again. After this had been repeated about a dozen times, the steel consisted of thousands of paper-thin laminations of hard and soft metal. When it was ground to a sharp edge the hard metal stood out and resisted dulling, while the soft steel kept the sword from breaking.
But to produce their best blades, the swords that are sought after by collectors today, the Japanese sword makers used a much more intricate process. For the core, or interior, of the blade, they used a comparatively soft, laminated metal that would resist breaking. The blade's exterior and edge, however, were made of different grades of hard steel welded together in a sandwich that was folded and hammered out as many as 20 times or more, giving it more than a million laminations! This outer "skin" of steel could be made even harder by first heating the sword and then suddenly cooling it. As a final step the master swordsmith would cover the roughly finished blade with a thick layer of adhesive material, mostly clay, leaving only the edge exposed, and heat the blade until the glowing metal reached the right shade of color. The best way to judge this crucially delicate stage was to work in a darkened room. The exposed edge cooled instantly while the rest of the blade, protected by the clay, cooled slowly and remained comparatively soft. The final result was a sword blade of soft non-brittle metal enclosed in a thin layer of hard steel. About one fifth of an inch of its edge was made of metal so hard that it held a razor sharpness during repeated use in battle.
