The companies that bring us knife steel

Re:The companies that bring us knife steel by sandworm101 on Thursday October 08, 2020 @02:22PM (#24722086)

The knowledge has been lost, but also probably never really existed. The legendary damascus steel had a specific mix of impurities, things other than carbon and iron, but the smiths of the time could not have known of those impurities. They would simply know that iron from certain sources/mines was magically better. When those sources of iron ran dry, damascus steel stopped being a thing. Today it is more of an ornamental pattern than a practical improvement in the blade.

On the opposite side, Japanese swordsmiths worked with very pure iron heavily refined from sources like river sand. It didn't have many impurities, resulting in rather soft steel. That in turn mandated all the folding that Japanese swords are famous for. Damascus steel was good ingredients turned into great steel. Japanese steel was mediocre ingredients turned into good swords.

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Re:The companies that bring us knife steel by Accujack on Thursday October 08, 2020 @03:31PM (#24722875)

Actually, the iron they were able to refine wasn't terrifically pure because of the source they had for it, sand. The folding wouldn't have done anything to make pure iron into a better blade.

What all that folding did do, however, is ensure that all the impurities in the metal were evenly distributed throughout the blade, thus allowing lower quality metal to be used to make high quality blades.

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Re:The companies that bring us knife steel by fizx on Thursday October 08, 2020 @02:49PM (#24722371)

I think we now understand much of the legend of the original damascus steel to have come from trace amounts of vanadium in the ore.

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Re:The companies that bring us knife steel by bleair on Thursday October 08, 2020 @03:40PM (#24722984)

I'm not an expert, but that sounds right (matches what I've read in papers).

This page has interesting info. https://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeven-9809.ht...

It seems likely 3 factors were important in creating "real" Damascus steel. The key one being the mixture of elements in the raw ore that specifically came from the mines in a specific region of southern India, and once that ore ran out the "secret was lost". There's also the knowledge of the forging process - namely the temperatures, heat treatment processes used, and what organics (aka carbon) got mixed in.

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