Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Salamandyr" data-source="post: 5350580" data-attributes="member: 40233">No.  That's not true at all.  The purpose of pattern welding is to try to get consistent high carbon steel throughout a blade.  At the time the best way to do so was to 'fold' the steel over and over, creating layers of higher carbon sandwiched between layers of low carbon.  It also helped with consistency.  Pretty much every culture that went through an iron age discovered and used it.  The Vikings, for instance, were very advanced (they added bird poop to the mix which added, IIRC, phosphorus to the alloy).  The same technique was used in the Middle East.  There were no 'secrets' that the Merovingions had, that were lost that somebody else didn't have themselves.  Metallurgy was in a constant state of discovery.Around 1300, Europeans developed better ways to create consistent high carbon steel and largely abandoned folding, except for decorative purposes.  Swords became less expensive because they were easier to produce, not because they were made less well.  They were over all, better; they could be made longer, for the same weight, with more flexibility.  European swords are massively superior to Japanese swords in terms of flexibility, being able to bend better than 90 degrees from true.  The Japanese essentially became the foremost masters of an obsolete practice, continuing to fold steel rather to make their swords long after the rest of the world had found better techniques.  From an aesthetic standpoint, they were fantastic, but functionally, their weapons were no better than anyone elses.The sharpness of their blades came not from the folding, but from the differential tempering.  The edge and back of the blade were tempered for different periods of time.  This caused the katana's stereotypical curve (in later years, improvements in the process allowed for straighter katanas), and led to a fantastically hard edge.  This was both good and bad.  Good, because it would hold a fantastic edge.  Bad, because the resulting blade was stiff, and often brittle.  Also, any damage to the blade that extended past the hardened edge could never be adequately repaired.In regards to the martial arts, Western thought has generally embraced the new, envisioning it as an "improvement" over previous styles, rather than merely a change to fit different societal needs.  As such, we have the 19th Century Romantics, who glorified the French school of swordplay as the "most advanced" while falsely maligning earlier schools as "merely beating on each other with bars of metal".  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Single time fencing is, at least in my opinion, even more elegant and advanced than the later double time style.Sources for my info was picked up here and there, over the past 5 years or so of fencing and HEMA, and reading various websites and books on swordmaking, from ARMA, Armory.com, metallurgy sites, and encyclopedias.  For a halfway decent overview of the history of swordplay, which goes over some of this, try...[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Sword-Gladiators-Musketeers-Swashbucklers-Paperbacks/dp/0812969669/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1287081203&sr=8-4]Amazon.com: By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions (Modern Library Paperbacks) (9780812969665): Richard Cohen: Books[/ame]</blockquote>

Verification