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I remember (so probably made up to tell people) that the reason that folded blade was to increase the strength from variable carbon content raw material and recycled steel. It is amazing to me that the technique has been lost and cannot be matched with modern technology
This was my understanding too. Logically it makes sense. You're talking about a time where people were digging lumps of rock and cooking them.
As far as I understand it's not a question of modern tech not being capable. It's that there is absolutely no need to fold pieces of impure steel with highly varying structure (air, sand, other metals, etc.) loads and loads of time to make each layers impurities negligible.
hugo7-
Hi,
I'm not 'picking on you',
but you seem to have made the most recent posting on this concept.Repeated folding and hammering reduces the number of grain boundaries in a piece of steel. The alloying process of iron principally with carbon, and other metal atoms, some as impurities, some deliberately added to improve physical properties, gives rise to micro crystals. Each boundary between these crystals reduces the density of the steel and the strength. All iron-working civillisations deduced that repeated hammering of raw steel gave better more durable implements.
mespilus
@ChasnotRobert
Kitchen devil are fiskars now, I have a kitchen devil control either large cooks knife and or asian cooks knife that was a cheapy from asda when I was cooking at a friends and every knife was blunt. The blade is thin and quite flexi but great at fine or thick chopping and the rubbery handle stays in wet hands.
@sohi Thanks for the photos, it is really interesting. Stupid question but can I asked what you used to get the blade photos.
@3c70 Had the impression the knives and tool site sold decent stuff, shows how much I know (yeah look at my knife collection) Your mention of the art of making a Japanese sword have been lost, I remember (so probably made up to tell people) that the reason that folded blade was to increase the strength from variable carbon content raw material and recycled steel. It is amazing to me that the technique has been lost and cannot be matched with modern technology.