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Comment by throwaway81523 | Hacker News Reader

This article doesn't address the 1998 discovery that the "lost" art was the presence of vanadium in the ores that real damascus blades were made from. The vanadium gave the steel its strength from the 13th to 17th centuries or something like that. It was present in iron ore mined in a particular region, and those mines eventually ran out, after which the "recipes" for damascus steel weren't lost, they simply stopped working and no one knew why. They had no way to tell the difference between iron ore from one place and ore from another.

This is explained in the 1998 Verhoeven, Pendray, and Dauksch (VPD) article]1] that the reddit post cites without touching on this crucial aspect. Or anyway, I thought that VPD's explanation was now generally accepted. This isn't anywhere near my field though.

[1] Verhoeven, John D. et al. “The key role of impurities in ancient damascus steel blades.” JOM 50 (1998): 58-64.

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I think one has to seperate the steel alloy, which covered, and the forging techniques used. The former ran out, at which point steel quality decreased. Lets call that steel from Damascus.

And there is what is now commonly called Damast steel, basically folded and twisted steel of dofferent properties. That technique is as old as blacksmithing because it was, more or less, the only way to get rid of impurities. The Japanese developed this technique to the extreme by not just getting rid of impurities but by gettind specific steel properties to defined parts of a blade.

European sword smiths stopped doing that, first European steel became better and more homogenous and didn't require anywhere near as much imourity removal. Secondly, spring steel is pretty sturdy monosteel, so need need to get specific steel in specific parts of a blade. And lastky, European bladed weapons from the Napoleonic era onwards were industrially mass produced (as compared to the manufacture mass production from earlier periods). And mass production means cost reductions, that didn't start with MBAs. Sonce those weapons were good enough to kill people by stabbing, cutting and slashing them Damast steel wasn't needed. The obvious exception are expensive master pieces forged individually. And the better quality "industrial" ones.

Damast steel has renessaonce at the moment, mainly because it looks great. And it is a way for knife makers to upsell, otherwise not a singpe one of them could compete on price.

The Japanese way of blade making has the benefit of having properties of the alloy at, e.g., the blade (hard and sharp) and the core and back of a blade (softer and stronger). Damast steels properties are all over the place, meaning it has no real value, IMHO, regarding a blades capabilities when it c;mes to cutting. Those blades so, as the Japanese ones, are falling into the region of art so, and there the optical properties matter a lot. And there Damast is just beautiful.

From experience so, Damast steel bars are hard to get rigjt, I'll go out on a limb and say Japanese bar steel is easier (if you forgo the tradidional Tamahagane way that is). Finishing the blade is easier woth Damast so, a proper Japanese blade requires so much delicate heat treatment and polishing to get right, it is borderline rediculous.

> Lets call that steel from Damascus.

That's confusing to me, what exactly was from Damascus, the steel or the forging technique? Reading the article OP cited says: "This suggests the possibility that the low levels of vanadium found in the genuine wootz blades of Table III may have resulted from ore deposits in India where the wootz steels were produced. "

It’s called Damascus because that was the entrepôt from which it entered Europe. It’s actually from South Asia. A similar thing happened with fabric... muslin and damasque are from India, not Mosul and Damascus

Wikipedia says both muslin and damasque originated in or around Mosul and Damascus, though. Their production moved to India later on, due to comparative advantage, I imagine.

the citation here is just from the 1911 britanica, which is not a terribly reliable source! For what its worth, transparent muslin is depicted on the walls of ajunta (in the Vessantara Jataka painting in cave 17) from the sixth century, and are mentioned in the Harsacarita, from the seventh, both from before Mosul was a major center.

He’s partially right. Damascus was made from Wootz steel which was imported from India. The technique of adding carbon to the steel to harden it causing the characteristic bands was discovered in India.

The japanese blades consist of four different kinds of steel. A soft core, the sides, the back and the cutting edge. The characteristic curve of the blade only comes into being in the hardening process, because the cutting edge expands more then the rest.

Source: Watched when japanese smiths, who have the status of a priest in japan, showed their craft for the first time outside of japan.

Yeah, There are all kinds of cross sections on high quality Japanese sword blades. Or rather simple ones, no way every foot soldier had a 20 times folded, 4 section (or whatever that is actually called) perfectly polished and heat treated blade.

Actually, come think of it, there are contemporary sources decribing how to straighten bent blades on the battlefield over some rock to continue fighting.

If you are interessted, there is a book on that topic (https://www.amazon.com/Art-Japanese-Sword-Swordmaking-Apprec..., Amazon was the first result that came up), it is really comprehensive covers everything from raw Tamahagane to the scabard, including guidance on polishing and heat treatment. Can only recommmend it! Buy the hard copy so, the eBook is unreadable.

Generally speaking, foot soldiers didn't have swords at all. Most of them were given a much cheaper to make spear.

Through out the ages every soldier carried a dagger, a sword and a main weapon. All made cheap if course. The sword is a side arm, basically serving the same purpose pistols do in the military today. A spear is also so much better on a battlefield, can be used in formation, has surperior reach and is cheaper to make.

> so need need to get specific steel in specific parts of a blade.

This is not quite true. Even today, there are many secrets surrounding metalworking. The highest quality "blades" (such as plow blades/moldboards), may have steel with quite diffent qualities in different areas of the blade.

The blade may start out as monosteel, but differential exposure to oxygen, carbon or different temperatures in different parts of the blade is a common way to create blades that have different microstructures (crystal structures, chemical bonds, microshapes) as well as a carbon content that can vary within the blade. These helps them to retain an edge better, better avoid scratching, while maximizing durability and minimizing weight and thickness.

True, but those blades start live as monosteel or, highly expensive specialized and top notch tech, sintered semi finished pieces. The latter is much closer to being a modern version of what the Japanese did than the former. The former can also be done by induction hardening. I researched that a bit a while ago, and it is basically highly controllable hardening for e.g. gears and surface hardening.

Metallurgy is quite fascinating.

Metallurgy is quite fascinating.

It is, but with all the above upthread said, I feel I'd probably get a high quality blade, if I just take my mower's 2 foot mulching blade, and use it as a sword.

I wonder how many current masterpieces, from antiquity, were created by having 20 apprentices pump out blades, and just picking the best out of 1000 blades for a respected client.

> I wonder how many current masterpieces, from antiquity, were created by having 20 apprentices pump out blades, and just picking the best out of 1000 blades for a respected client.

Probably 0. Swords were not that random. High quality swords would either be made from Wootz/Crucible steel, which was an expensive resource (but relatively easy to forge into a good blade) or by using various folding methods, that was immensively labour intensive.

A smith would not have apprentices produce 1000s of such blades. That would be too expensive.. Low quality swords would be produced using less labour intensive methods, and sold in larger numbers. These production methods would ensure that they would not reach the highest level of quality.

Top-quality swords would be made very carefully by or under supervision from a master, in much smaller numbers. Some of these may not have had obvious flaws, but not 99.9%.

Steel, regardless of quality, was an expensive commodity up until the early 20th century. Up to then iron to steel ratios were roughly around 9:1, maybe even with a higher iron rate in pre-modern periods. Then it flipped, and today you have a hard time to get simple iron at all.

One of the reasons steel weapons were reforged, faulty blades reworked. And handles, as well as the inner parts of the blades, used to be iron. Also in Japan sometimes. Simply because it is cheaper, and the sharp edges between handle and blade are less brittle and this less critical during heat treatment. And heat treatment of non-standardized steel is a black art indeed.

That being said, European blade making was shared enterprise since the earliest days. One general contractor signed with a customer, then he sub-contracted a smith for the blade, one for the cross guard and handle, one for polishibg, one for scabards and, if was not the same guy, one for assembly. That's were the english word cuttlery comes from. Otherwise a single smith would produce maybe a dozen blades per year, maybe even less. Not even close to what was needed.

This list of medieval prices lists two swords: https://regia.org/research/misc/costs.htm

One costs 1625 shilling, or less than the cost of a female slave.

The other costs 24000, more than the price of 9 female slaves.

Clearly, for the second sword, the steel was not the main part of the cost.

> https://regia.org/research/misc/costs.htm

As an aside, that website is a great example of what the web used to be. Absurdly informative, fun to browse, and obviously a labor of love.

Same as today, I once investigated how to buy a new, but tradionally forged, Katana. Turned out that a) antiques are cheaper and b) the mounting (simple wood vs tsuba and all) can double the price, easily. Like modern day cars, the options drive the price even if the engine / blade are the same...

Compared to the price of female slaves, blades have become cheaper, though. I could only afford one female, and as it turns out, she expects me to be HER slave :)

> Then it flipped, and today you have a hard time to get simple iron at all.

Very true. Simple elemental iron is extremely hard to find; possibly because nobody wants it. (Whenever you see phrases like "wrought iron" or "cast iron" or "ornamental iron" today that's all steel, not true iron.)

The best source I've found for true iron is wagon tires. These are the metal bands that were wrapped around wooden wagon wheels in the 1800s, and many of them are pure iron. Sometimes you can find them at antique stores or in a farmer's field. They survive long after the original wagon has rotted. They're always very rusty but that's no big deal.

Why would you want simple iron? Because it's very soft and much easier to work than steel. And if you cut into it slightly and bend it at the cut, you'll see the marvelously beautiful huge crystal structure that only true iron possesses. It's wonderful stuff; just not very durable compared to steel.

You can buy pure electrolytic iron powder from powder-metallurgy vendors. It's of course not 100% pure but it's a lot purer than 19th-century iron tires.

Iron is hard to purify. This is partly because it's so enthusiastic about reacting with other elements. It's like the Oprah Winfrey of elements, or the gender-swapped version of oxygen: "You get an electron, and you get an electron, and you get an electron! Everybody! gets! an! electron!" Worse, in nature it's always hanging out with its buddies manganese and nickel, and they're hard to separate. It's not as bad as zirconium and hafnium, but almost.

It wasn't until the 01930s that reasonably pure iron was produced, and it was found that it was much softer than anyone had previously suspected.

I should clarify that my desire for iron is in the form of bars that I can work in my blacksmith shop, and iron in that form is hard to find in my experience.

I'm sure chemical-grade iron is available but melting iron powder into ingots in an oxygen-free environment is beyond my capabilities ATM.

I wonder if you could decarburize molten mild steel into wagon-wheel-tire-purity iron by blasting air or oxygen through it for a longer period of time than a steel mill would find profitable. This involves temperatures well above normal blacksmithing temperatures but it doesn't require a dangerous oxygen-free environment.

Interesting idea. So you're saying that the oxygen will bind more readily to the carbon than to the iron itself, and carry it off as COx? I'm not a chemist but I know iron loves to bind with oxygen (i.e. burn) at high temperatures; that's why oxyacetylene cutting torches work so well.

Yes, as I understand it, that's how steel mills make steels from pig iron, by blowing air through them to remove carbon (as well as things like sulfur and even phosphorus). It heats up the molten steel, too, so once you get it going you don't need to keep applying heat from the outside, so your furnace fire doesn't need to be able to reach the melting temperature of the final pure iron (1538°) but only the melting point of what you start with, say, cast iron (as low as 1147° but usually closer to 1400°). Have you done cast-iron casting?

I understand that when you're blacksmithing normally having your iron get hot enough to become a self-sustaining fire is a risk to be avoided rather than a goal but I feel like this might be less alarming if it's in a ladle covered up with a layer of flux and slag so that it stops burning whenever you stop blowing bubbles into it through a straw.

There's obviously the difficulty of what to make your straw out of. Apparently the standard answer in modern basic oxygen steelmaking is, "a water-cooled, copper tipped lance with 3–7 nozzles is lowered into it to within a few feet of the surface of the bath and high-purity oxygen at a pressure of 700–1,000 kilopascals (100–150 psi) is introduced at supersonic speed," but I imagine graphite or aluminum phosphate would work too and might be a bit less exciting.

Apparently the standard way of doing this from Han China until the invention of the Bessemer converter is a thing called "puddling" which sounds a bit less violent but also slower. Wikipedia explains, "Working as a two-man crew, a puddler and helper could produce about 1500 kg of iron in a 12-hour shift. The strenuous labour, heat and fumes caused puddlers to have a very short life expectancy, with most dying in their 30s."

So, maybe not something you want to do every day, but it seems like something you could probably do a few times in your lifetime—I'm guessing 1500 kg of iron would last you a good long time of hobby blacksmithing, and we have a lot more respiratory PPE now than we did in the 01800s.

I've always been curious about casting but never tried it. One of these days.

In some countries there are foundries and schools that do weekend classes where they walk you through the steps and already have all the necessary equipment and safety knowledge. You might see if you can sign up for one. Anything involving molten iron has a tendency to be, on the human scale, incredibly violent; as a consequence, it requires great delicacy and care.

Or you could start with pot metal or aluminum.

I'd pick an old leave spring over the mower blade, but you are right. Doing blades myself right now, I never got why people use old car springs. Sure they are cheap, and there I am and I paid 300 bucks for 6m of 24x8 mm 5071 spring steel straight from a supplier. That's a lot of blades. And medieval blacksmiths would have killed for that steel.

I use car springs to make tools for my shop but yeah, if I were making blades for sale I'd probably start with the good stuff.

Not that used car springs are bad material wise so. I'm just way to lazy to spend hours hammering into a bar-like shape before I start hammering into the shape I want. Much simpler to start with a proper bar from the beginning.

I know a guy who starts usually with a spiral screw for his blades, and those blades are beautiful.

Not that I'm representative, I made a couple of blades out of Japanese multi-layer steel. And do have some rather expensive Japanese multi-layer steel bars laying around for later, one in a proper Katana-like structure with an iron back and one with 22 layers of chrom-stainless steel with a middle layer of paper steel, both around 8mm thick. They cost a factor 4 more than the ordinary spring steel I mentioned earlier. But since I don't have the time, nor the skill, to make those raw multi-layer bars myself I bought them for my tries at Katana-like blades. One day that is, I planned my first sword to be done in early 2020 and still didn't get started...

Damascus steel I've heard about over the years was supposedly named in one of the crusades (Damascus being in the middle east, and the crusades being in the middle east) and european knights encountering swords of vastly superior sharpness, strength, durability, and flexibility. This was noteworthy because ideal swords are strong and sharp, but flex so they don't shatter/become brittle (which is bad in combat...), with strength and flexibility being opposing properties when forging swords. Too

The Damascus blades somehow exceeded european crusade era steels in all three areas, which was thought impossible. And, superficially at a minimum, these swords had a pattern.

This simple etymology isn't mentioned, nor is the crusades, the sharpness/flexibility/strength/superiority, which seems strange.

I suppose you'd need a sampling of the crusades era weaponry and its properties, and try to find a real damascus blade with similar superior properties to verify the military advantage, and then figure out if it is just better. I've seen a lot of reddit/HN postings and I don't know if the superior swords were actually demonstrated.

I recall one post speculating carbon nanotubes forming back when "carbon nanotubes" was a very clickworthy headline term.

Can you take relics and heirloom swords and destroy them for testing? Probably not. Thus, the mystery. Are the "damascus swords" we do have actually the militarily superior ones? Were they just slightly better but more uniformly performant, while knight swords were a bit more variant?

Who knows. I don't think this article really cleared up much nor lived up to the central claim "we can do that, it's not a lost art".

It didn’t come from specific mines. Damascus was made from wootz steel from India. The Indians discovered the technique of adding carbon during the smelting process to harden the steel and give it its characteristic bands. It was a well known technique and they knew exactly what they were doing.

Seems surprising at first sight that they still bothered to do the fancy process thing, if a regular blade made from that ore would have been about just as good. But us who live in the 21st century should not have any difficulty at all understanding the power of brand.

I imagine it going like this: first, blades from a certain region start making a name for themselves for superior quality (thanks to the ore). Then a few things happen side by side, augmenting each other:

- higher prices allow smiths to spend more time per blade

- blades from that region become a status product, giving them almost exclusive access to the market segment that is willing to spend extra on fancy craftsmanship, resulting in even more time per blade

- export markets get flooded with fakes that only claim to be from the high reputation region, some of the fancy craftsmanship ends up serving as a sign of authenticity

This sort of crucible steel was one of the only known ways to make steel before the modern processes were invented. It wasn't a "fancy process", it was the only process.

This isn't true. First the terminology is a bit weird. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. This fact was not known until the 19th century! Classial "wrought iron" (whih has a carbon content under 2%) has a similiar composition to what is now called mild steel (it has somewhat different physical properties because wrought iron has inclusions of slag because of how its made). Classical steel has a somewhat higher carbon content. Pig iron (or cast iron) has an even higher carbon content, and is the product of a blast furnace. Steel could be made in a number of ways. The process of creating wrought iron naturally produces some higher carbon steel, which could be removed. This is how japanese swordmaking works (they take higher carbon steel, and low carbon steel, and pound the together). The finery process, invented in china, but heavilly used in europe, involved taking pig iron, and slowly oxidizing it to remove carbon. For armor, case hardening involves baking wrought iron in carbon to cause the surface to become steel. The cementation process from early modern europe involved doing this, and then folding the steel to produce uniform metal. Indian steelmaking didn't involve pig iron, since india didn't use blast furnaces.

Durong the Viking era people forged Ulfhardt swords, branding is as old people can draw stuff it seems.

> Seems surprising at first sight that they still bothered to do the fancy process thing, if a regular blade made from that ore would have been about just as good.

That's because it's not that simple. Ore plays a part, but the main "secret" to "True Damascus" steel is the Crucible Steel process that was almost unique to South/Central Asia. Most steel producers in the Medieval era were not able to properly melt steel, since they were not able to create a sufficiently high temperature. But a few, primarily in India and Central Asia (and probably at least one place in Europe, associated with the Ulfberth brand) knew how to melt pig iron (that has a lower melting point) together with iron or steel to create Crucible/Damascus/Wootz steel.

Most Europeans and East Asians did not have access to such steel, meaning that European (except a few 'True Ulfberht'), Chinese, Korean and Japanese were made from inferior steel compared to swords made from Wootz/Damascus steel.

That doesn't mean that all such blades were bad. But that is where the intricate process came in, and without access to Wootz steel, creating high quality blades required a lot more labour and skill.

Thanks for the corrections, I guess I might have accidentally explained, in the fake camp, that "other kind" the reddit post was referring to. I wonder if there are examples of both variants combined, perhaps to get an even stronger visual effect?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulfberht_swords#Description

R.I.P Alfred Pendray

Here is a film of them making a wootz ingot and discussing vanadium.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OP8PCkcBZU4

Thanks for that link. The vid is a 50 minute documentary about damascus steel, featuring Al Pendray and others. I've only watched a small part of it but it looks really good. I will try to take in the rest soon.

Posted by mike loades, a personal hero of mine. The doc, you can tell, is kind of a celebratory recollection of how they worked through their research. Not the best editing and some awkward social moments but it is the only film like this I've ever seen.

I didn't know this, that's really interesting. I, like I think many others, was under the impression that Damascus was a lost technique. I'm under the further impression though that our modern alloys have long since passed the standard of these ancient Damascus steels. Is that true?

No historical steel beat modern day steel alloys, not when it comes to quality nor to predictablility. You heat treat a certain SAE spec stell in a certain way and you get tye same result, within accepted and specified tolerances, regardless if batch. No such thing in the past. Also, modern day steel is just dirt cheap, even the higher spec monosteels.

Some modern steel alloys from Sweden with extreme strength costs more than silver.

It depends on production quantities, for sure. And don't get me started with aerospace grade heat treated high tensile stuff. The high spec mass produced stuff is still extremely cheap, if you can get it in small volumes. And whether or not those more esoteric alloys actually improve blade quality, well, I'm not sure. But the again at the higher end we talk more art work than tool, and art os following its own rules.

Ok, I found a link to the VPD article: https://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeven-9809.ht...

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