Knife porn thread

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hugo7 in reply to @lynx

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.

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mespilus in reply to @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.

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hugo7 in reply to @mespilus

Cheers. That's interesting and makes sense.

Although at it's root, it doesn't seem to contradict my layman's reading around. In that the origin of this is was necessitated by the quality of metal.
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Sharkstar in reply to @mespilus

Reminds me of that poem by Tony Harrison:

"Uncle Joe came here to die. His gaping jaws
once plugged in to the power of his stammer
patterned the stuck plosive without pause
like a d-d-damascener's hammer."

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