Hank Reinhardt's The Book of the Sword by Hank Reinhardt Read Free Book Online Page A

quite good, so it's clear the technique was around well before that. There are many swords dating from the 10th century that were pattern welded.
    Pattern welding developed when it was found that if long thin bars of iron were placed in a container filled with charcoal and heated up red hot you got a steely iron. This is essentially case hardening. However, if you do this several times, then the iron bars became steel, with a good amount of carbon. The smith would take a few of these iron bars, wind them around each other and forge out a blade. Then additional steel bars would be forge welded to the edges and the point. After being filed to final shape it would be hardened and tempered.
    The forging would cause carbon migration from the steel bars to the iron bars, and if there was a sufficiency of carbon to start with, you ended up with a good, tough blade. But as you can easily surmise, a lot could go wrong. You might not have enough carbon to start with or, even if you do, it might leach out. This is where a very good smith was quite important, and why his reputation was his livelihood. A good smith did everything he could to assure that the swords he made were as good as he could make them. One thing he did was use the best ores he could get.
    Iron ore comes in many forms. Bog iron was a very impure ore that contained all sorts of inclusions, such as phosphorus, arsenic and sulfur, that made it very difficult, if not impossible, to make a good sword. Other ores might contain manganese, which increased the toughness of the steel. Vanadium and titanium might also show up, and these also helped to make the sword tougher and stronger.
    Pattern welding did not produce a magical sword, but if the smith was lucky, he could produce a good sword. Several of these swords have been tested, and the carbon content varied from .03 to as high as .06 percent. Rarely was this evenly distributed throughout the sword, but there was enough to produce a tough, rather flexible blade.
DAMASCUS
    The term "Damascus steel" is a very confusing one. It originally referred to swords that were purchased in Damascus, then it came to mean shotgun barrels that were forged together after being wrapped around a central core. Some also use the term to mean a type of steel produced in India that is now termed "wootz." In modern knife making it refers to taking bars of steel, forging them together and etching them to produce blades with patterns. And the term "Damascene" refers to gold work inlaid on the blade. For this book the term refers to Eastern swords, both where the blade is made of one type of steel, and one where the blade is forged with another steel to produce patterns.
    The Indians developed a superior method of producing steel, and they did this quite early, approximately 200 BC. This seems shockingly early to most people, but Indian steel has long been regarded as the best. This was done by heating the iron ore in a crucible combined with various carboniferous items. As the iron began to absorb the carbon, the melting point lowered, and more carbon was picked up and dispersed throughout the iron. This produced a bloom of steel with a carbon content as much as three percent.
    This method of manufacture produced a bloom of steel that is called "watered steel" as the various minor impurities and crystalline structure of the steel gives a watermark effect. This could be heightened by various forging and even mechanical Damascus methods to produce swords of incredible beauty. Not only were they beautiful, they were excellent swords. This is the real source of the tales of Damascus swords that could cut through steel and do all sorts of wonderful things. European knights encountered these blades during the Crusades; much of the steel work was traded in and around Damascus, and there were even swordsmiths there. So the legend was born, but the actual source of the steel, and many of the swords, was India.
    The Japanese did not have this method of