h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I like how it holds the heat and doesn't get dented and how you can clean it with sand. I like the texture of it when it's greased and the rusty odor. But I could live without it too.

Once i heard the phrase "A smell of knife blades".
Iron also has a unique odour when hot.
And i like the way it's gleam is different from that of aluminium or silver.
Live without it? Survive without it maybe.
Or i would not be at all, blacksmithes being an integral part of my family tree.

another absolutely delightful way to cook is with steam heat. i don't mean just steaming a fish or veggies in a steamer. the new oven which use high temperature steam not only carry the flavor of the herbs and spices deep into the food they keep it moist. a pan of water when you grill will have a similar effect. the food is still crisp on the outside, tender on the inside but also delectably moist. try it. you could do so with a turkey. do not seat it in the pan, have it raised above the floor (in a pan made of light cast iron - with a lid - coated with a ceramic finish); put a layer of white wine and butter and select spices such as desert sage and rosemary and garlic in the bottom of the roasting pan; it will come steaming up from below and carress the food from all sides and it will impart fantastic flavors into the bird.

That sounds like a great idea, Kyaa.

Steel's sort of different than iron though, don't you think, Delicia? I think the casehardening on saw blades and old guns is kind of pretty.

Blacksmithing is kind of facinating too. How you can get the temperature of the forge up to 2000 degrees with the bellows then make nails or knives or axeheads or horseshoes or whatever. Then listening to the ringing of that hundred pound anvil when the smith hammers away. All that stuff is pretty amazing.

Yes of course you're right, steel is sometimes called an iron alloy because it contains around 1 % carbon. To me the most interesting is steel because of what the smith can do with the molecular structure by hardening, tempering and pattern welding. There are also steel alloys, which would mean the alloy of an alloy if we're particular.
Cast iron isn't 100 % iron either, it contains more carbon than steel, giving it that indomitable quality. Wrought iron contains the least carbon and can be bent into lots of interesting shapes.
You got me going now.

That's cool. Does the carbon make it harder? What's the difference between hardness and brittleness? What's stainless steel then or spring steel or surgical steel? Now you got me going too.

hey, the story in my wife's family is that her paternal grandfather came up with the use of a drop forge process to make tools such as scissors; of course, being a loyal employee, he did not patent that process for himself.

he was quite good at using metals; he even made steel tools (knives, etc.) - still in use by us, at home, using a modified bar-b-que hearth.

here's a good link, while it's still in google's cache:

http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:1VCHb4M9z-wC:www.chicagocutlery.com/chicago/knowledge/knife_history.html+%22drop+forge+process%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Thanks for the link. I'm a little surprised though that the author didn't mention the so-called Damascus process which I think is what Japanese sword makers have used for centuries.

Yes, carbon makes steel harder, entering into a molecular structure with it, that is called cementite, or more precise, iron carbide, which is influenced by the heat treatments, such as hardening and tempering.
The relationship of carbon and steel is responsible for a set of properties of the steel, for instance shock resistance, toughness, hardness.
Adding elements like molybdenum, chromium, nickel, wolfram, vanadium gives steels with different properties, for different uses, like surgical steel, spring steel, tool steel etc.
Now in that excellent knife site of Kyaa's it is said that Chromium makes steel tougher, less brittle. I think that statement needs qualifying. In knife blades Chromium is ok, but in longer blades, like swords, it does lead to increased brittless, which is why those shiny decorative swords often sold would be useless and downright dangerous if crossed with other baldes.

The Damascene process is a whole chapter to itself. Starting with the definition, Damascus steel today usually means pattern welded steel, meaning layers of steel are folded and forged together. Pattern welding is an art that was also known in China, Japan and in Northern Europe.
The famous Damascus blades however were originally not forged by pattern welding, the idea is now that they were forged from wootz steel, which was a special steel imported from India, and because of it’s properties, namely the iron/carbon ratio, and had very specific forging properties. In the process of forging this steel tended to form separate bands with different carbon contents in the steel, resulting in a dark-light patterning in the steel, that is similar to pattern welded steel.

I could go on and on and on, but won't.

going of from the steely question to something even more incisive:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ED03Ak02.html

do go and read the article at the other end of the link!

Met a guy at the art museum yesterday who's sort of an expert on samarai swords.

He told me the smiths would take a block of iron maybe as big around as a man's arm and pound it out like dough all flat and then sprinkle charcoal on it and fold it over. They repeated this process, reheating, forging and quenching, and singing chants to get timing right, until they ended up with blades that had alternating bands of soft and hard steel. This gave the blades very sharp edges without brittleness. You can cut paper with them but they won't shatter easily.

I thought that was a very interesting process.

He said some of the WWII swords were stamped and therefore of inferior quality. They were issued to junior grade officers simply as emblems of their rank. The senior grades apparently got the real thing, done the old-fashioned way.

the described process is familiar. i have seen a fragment of something similar in application a long time ago when i was a little kid. i also remember the pounding of gold and silver into edible wafers thinner than paper....

There's different methods of increasing the carbon content of steel. Beside charcoal also feathers, goose shit, and horn, anything with a high carbon content was traditionally used. African smithes made charcoal from grass, btw.
The heating, forging, reheating process is universal, it aims to expel impurities from the steel, and later of course give the shape. At the end of the process stand some specific heat treatments, the normalising, to refine grain size and structure and smooth out inner strain from forging, and hardening by quenching in water, oil, or other liquids, followed by tempering, which is a careful reheating to relieve inner strain from hardening. During that latter process a little of the hardness is lost again.Different steels respond very differently to the heat treatments.
It's also universal for smiths to measure time with verses, songs, prayers, incantations.

The forging of a katana, these are the Samurai swords, is a very intriguing bit of metallurgy, and also history.
It's called the Japanese Solution, meaning composite structure (up to five different parts) and selective hardening, involving clay.
This is a rather good link
http://anime.jyu.fi/~saren/Docs/Sword.html#MAKING.

thanks D, fun.