|
It's unfortunate that because of the materials on that sword, it will never be made on Forged in Fire. I want to see them chop ballistic horse heads.
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2017 12:53
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 11:58 |
|
|
A really interesting intersection of manufacturing constricts and very early pseudoindustrial production cropped up in the Warring States Period in China, from ~475-221 BCE, where a measure of standardization was used for equipping the very large armies being used at the time. Polearms were common, and one of the common materials for ji (halberd-like stabbing + slashing polearms) heads was cast iron. It's horrible for that purpose, of course, but no other metal was available that was simultaneously cheap, castable into a near-finished product, and that used minimal labour/fuel to go from ore to weapon. Copper/bronze was much more expensive and difficult to acquire than iron- although lots of bronze ji were manufactured alongside their cast-iron inferiors- and casting enabled fast mass production vs. the much more labour-intensive process of making wrought iron and then forging it into the fairly complex form the ji used weapon by weapon. 20 lovely spears was vastly preferable to 2 or 3 good spears when you and all your neighbours are arming for war as fast as humanly possible, so you get cast iron being used for hacking and stabbing weapons.
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2017 22:24
|
|
|
Thank you for the advice. I may yet try this. On the subject of staying away from exotic steels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_Mp1fNzIT8 Say I've got a shovel which is almost certainly made from mild steel (I welded it and it does not seem brittle). Would it be possible to case harden just the blade? Or would that create a shear point?
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2017 06:40
|
|
|
There is no harm in trying. You've got to have a healthy heat source, though. For the timescales he's talking about, you NEED to get it up to red glowing. Having the rest of the shovel there sinking heat away makes me wary. Give it a shot? I think two or three mapp-pro (RIP actual MAPP 1940-2008) torches, or a foundry, would be minimum? E: poo poo wrong wording. Hopefully you get what I mean.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2017 06:47
|
|
|
All I'm heading is that there's a market for electronicly controlled electric heat treating furnaces that are home sized. 
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2017 08:10
|
|
|
M_Gargantua posted:All I'm heading is that there's a market for electronicly controlled electric heat treating furnaces that are home sized. You know, shouldn't even be that hard to do. Craigslist a ceramics kiln and put a different controller on it. Optionally get some high temperature sealant and pump it full of inert gasses.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2017 13:36
|
|
|
Seems like doing it with an induction heater would be a bit easier/cheaper for home use, though it would limit the size of things you could put in you'd be able to control temperature really precisely.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2017 22:10
|
|
|
Gingery of DIY machine tool fame has a lesser-known book on building your own kilns you can probably track a copy of down. They're very simple devices that can be built quite cheaply, just an insulating box lined with nichrome wire coils that heat up when current is passed through them plus an adjustable power source of sufficient capacity. The main tricky part is knowing how much wire to use/how to coil it to get the results you want, and Gingery has already tackled that for you.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2017 23:49
|
|
|
ate all the Oreos posted:Seems like doing it with an induction heater would be a bit easier/cheaper for home use, though it would limit the size of things you could put in you'd be able to control temperature really precisely. Speaking as someone who isn't an electrical engineer, homebrew induction heaters confuse and scare me, but a homebrew resistive heater I can tackle no problem.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2017 02:23
|
|
|
My wife's a ceramic artist (and where's ArtistCeleste? she's a ceramic artist too) so I can tell you from experience that there are tons of small kiln options around. A "test kiln" with manual controls would do fine. The main challenge will be that the only front-loading kilns I've seen are huge: most of the small ones have a single lid on the top, and that's not very convenient for working with a metal piece that is long and thin. Kilns come in gas or electric. They are of course expensive to run and you need to set up adequate ventilation to avoid various unpleasant side effects. One thing is that kiln brick is sensitive to temperature shock: most kilns are not designed to be opened while at full temperature. There are "raku" kilns which are, and lots of people do DIY raku kilns with designs intended to make it easier to remove the work while it's red hot:  With raku, superheated ceramic is removed from the fire while blazing hot in order to either let it cool exposed to air or (more commonly these days although not traditionally with raku) put into combustable materials which cause interesting metallic sheens to show on the surface. Anyway, if I was gonna try and find a kiln to repurpose for metal heat treating, I'd probably look for a small used electric raku kiln.  Or just make one. And while you're at it, turn that garbage can on its side and you've... oh, you've just got a forge now, haven't you... Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Aug 1, 2017 |
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2017 02:08
|
|
|
 Galvy kiln belongs in the osha thread
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2017 02:24
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:
I can't wait until I'm not paying attention and go to throw something away and grab the handle on the kiln trash can by mistake
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2017 02:54
|
|
|
shame on an IGA posted:
Zinc oxide fumes are no joke.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2017 03:53
|
|
|
Just drink a bunch of milk Or wear a respirator, like you probably should anyhow. I used to do a bunch of welding on galvanized steel, never had a problem so long as I wore a p100 cartridge.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2017 04:29
|
|
|
or just buy the exact same $38 trash can in non-galvanized because why risk metal fume fever when you don't have to?
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2017 08:30
|
|
|
I wish it was easier to get hold of non galved nuts and bolts, I tend to weld those a lot I find.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2017 08:43
|
|
|
On the topic of swords, I read in a history book somewhere that the reason we use steel / iron is because it's common, not because it's better. Bronze weapons are the easiest to make, and are pretty effective. However, bronze requires copper and tin, which are apparently pretty rare, especially in the "Ancient World." Battles were fought and kingdoms rose and fell over things like copper mines. Iron wasn't as good, takes way more work, but... it's EVERYWHERE. So nations that couldn't make weapons out of bronze were forced to figure out how to work Iron. So even though it wasn't better objectively, Iron was better in the long run because everyone had access to it. necessity drove invention, and there we go.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2017 14:27
|
|
|
Pagan posted:On the topic of swords, I read in a history book somewhere that the reason we use steel / iron is because it's common, not because it's better. Bronze weapons are the easiest to make, and are pretty effective. However, bronze requires copper and tin, which are apparently pretty rare, especially in the "Ancient World." Battles were fought and kingdoms rose and fell over things like copper mines. Fun fact: one of the big reasons mesoamerica didn't advance technologically as much as the old world did despite having a pretty advanced society is due to easily accessible iron being virtually nonexistent, whereas in much of the old world it was all over the place
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2017 14:33
|
|
|
Pagan posted:On the topic of swords, I read in a history book somewhere that the reason we use steel / iron is because it's common, not because it's better. Bronze weapons are the easiest to make, and are pretty effective. However, bronze requires copper and tin, which are apparently pretty rare, especially in the "Ancient World." Battles were fought and kingdoms rose and fell over things like copper mines. All of that is so incorrect it sounds like something read on the internet rather than an actual published book.
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2017 00:10
|
|
|
Yeah, that doesn't make sense. If the copper alloys were just as good as the iron-carbon system, and the only problem with bronze was its relative scarcity, then people today would still be using bronze blades and bronze structural parts alongside steel ones. Instead, iron alloys completely replaced bronzes for nearly every mechanical purpose, barring a few special situations like bells (resonance) or casting (low melting point) or bearings (self-lubrication). Anyway steel is objectively better by most measures, sooooo Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Aug 2, 2017 |
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2017 03:46
|
|
|
Sagebrush posted:Yeah, that doesn't make sense. If the copper alloys were just as good as the iron-carbon system, and the only problem with bronze was its relative scarcity, then people today would still be using bronze blades and bronze structural parts alongside steel ones. Instead, iron alloys completely replaced bronzes for nearly every mechanical purpose, barring a few special situations like bells (resonance) or casting (low melting point) or bearings (self-lubrication). Steel is. Iron, on the other hand, isn't as nice as bronze. A good bronze is almost as good as a lesser steel. But, poo poo is waaay more expensive. It's one of those things that gets exaggerated, to the point where 'bronze is better than steel'.
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2017 09:54
|
|
|
Sagebrush posted:Yeah, that doesn't make sense. If the copper alloys were just as good as the iron-carbon system, and the only problem with bronze was its relative scarcity, then people today would still be using bronze blades and bronze structural parts alongside steel ones. Instead, iron alloys completely replaced bronzes for nearly every mechanical purpose, barring a few special situations like bells (resonance) or casting (low melting point) or bearings (self-lubrication). I think the idea is that the impetus to invent steel came from having to use iron for everything because bronze was expensive
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2017 13:20
|
|
|
Truly, we might finally answer the riddle of steel.
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2017 13:53
|
|
|
In this thread: debunking the Stone Age>Bronze Age>Iron Age Conspiracy
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2017 14:19
|
|
|
Rapulum_Dei posted:In this thread: debunking the Stone Age>Bronze Age>Iron Age Conspiracy I see dude selling hand-chipped stone knives right next to plump nerd selling steel knives. Yet I see no nerd, hipster, or closet recluse, selling bronze knives.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2017 02:52
|
|
|
Yooper posted:I see dude selling hand-chipped stone knives right next to plump nerd selling steel knives. Yet I see no nerd, hipster, or closet recluse, selling bronze knives. So you're saying it's an entirely untapped market?
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2017 20:04
|
|
|
Add an Internet connected app and you've got yourself a kickstarter.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2017 20:39
|
|
|
Slung Blade posted:So you're saying it's an entirely untapped market? And you know, I bet I could just make some permanent molds and cast the suckers... hmmm...
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2017 20:51
|
|
|
speaking of kickstarter and untapped market, there was a successfully funded one for inceptionesque spinning tops that sell for like $100+. but then again fidget spinners sell like hotcakes too so
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2017 21:13
|
|
|
Slung Blade posted:So you're saying it's an entirely untapped market? Maybe, but what kind of tap? Roll tap?
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2017 22:40
|
|
|
Tappee-tap-tap
Rapulum_Dei fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Aug 3, 2017 |
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2017 23:09
|
|
|
If you've hypothetically followed Dave Gingery's Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap series and had a working foundry, where would you even get the bronze?
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2017 06:54
|
|
|
DreadLlama posted:If you've hypothetically followed Dave Gingery's Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap series and had a working foundry, where would you even get the bronze? For the full hipster-ific experience, you'd mine your own copper and tin. By hand. Using artisan shovels. Beard.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2017 14:18
|
|
|
sharkytm posted:For the full hipster-ific experience, you'd mine your own copper and tin. By hand. Using artisan shovels. Beard. This one guy built a toaster entirely from scratch, as in dug up all the raw materials and went from there http://gizmodo.com/5794368/why-its-harder-than-you-think-to-make-a-simple-toaster
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2017 15:13
|
|
|
IRT a bunch of posts on the last page: e: scroll down a few posts Ambrose Burnside fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Aug 5, 2017 |
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2017 15:50
|
|
|
Sagebrush posted:Yeah, that doesn't make sense. If the copper alloys were just as good as the iron-carbon system, and the only problem with bronze was its relative scarcity, then people today would still be using bronze blades and bronze structural parts alongside steel ones. Instead, iron alloys completely replaced bronzes for nearly every mechanical purpose, barring a few special situations like bells (resonance) or casting (low melting point) or bearings (self-lubrication). Well, hang on, bronze and brass is still used today, but it's much more expensive than iron or steel. I would love to have some bronze fittings around my house, but can't justify the higher price. Just like the theory posited in the book... I need to figure out where I read this and post a source. Second, bronze age weapons need only be cast. No heat treat. No forging. No tempering. Just make a mold, melt the material, pour it, Clean it up a little. Is that a more difficult process than making an iron or steel weapon? Same with smelting; it doesn't take much to make bronze with limited resources. It takes a lot more work and effort to smelt iron. I'm open to the fact that I'm totally wrong, but the theories do make sense.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2017 20:24
|
|
|
The reality is that bronze can be just about as hard as crude steel, and just about as sharp, but it is more brittle and subject to work-hardening so if it gets bent, you can't just bend it back. Bronze and other copper alloys were valuable enough to be used for common currency throughout antiquity, which speaks to its scarcity and value (albeit silver and gold were always more valuable). Ambrose is also correct that the devil is in the details. Metal smelting and working techniques do not necessarily cleanly port from one metal to another; technologies do not always cleanly migrate from one region to another; there are political ramifications to using imported materials; and many other small details matter too. And they say "necessity is the mother of invention" - I could guess that (say) the Incas never needed metal weapons because they already had weapons technologies that allowed them to dominate the surrounding people militarily. (I don't know that for a fact, I'm just guessing.) It's also a mistake to compare modern bronze to modern steel and declare one the winner. If we're talking about the material used by civilizations in antiquity, you have to compare the actual steels and bronzes they were using: the alloys were of varying quality but never as good as what you can get from a modern steel mill. It's at least plausible that in some areas where iron or steel weapons had become available, bronze weapons were still "better" because the bronze was much higher quality and therefore was less prone to structural failure during use, or something. Some quick googling mostly turns up blog posts and the like: I'd love to find academic references on the subject. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Aug 4, 2017 |
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2017 23:09
|
|
|
ill just continue the post in full b/c of course i forgot to get back to that post after lunch - - - - - - - - - - - - IRT a bunch of posts on the last page: 1) there's a lot of debate on why iron smelting never happened in pre-contact South America, but "they had no iron" isn't a plausible theory. Not only do the Andes have respectable near-surface iron ore deposits, various groups in the region have a documented history of mining hematite, with mines found dating from before 0CE to an active mine worked by the Incans when Pizarro showed up. The funny thing is that they only used that hematite for dye/pigment purposes. So why didn't they smelt it despite having a very sophisticated nonferrous metalworking technology complex? The most plausible theory, imo, is because of their reliance on a unique form of smelter bellows. - - - - - - - - - - - - In premodern metalworking complexes, hand-blown bellows of one sort or another are almost universal. Designs range from simple pot/pit bellows made from animal skins and pots/earth pits and with one-way valve action provided by manually covering and uncovering an inlet hole, to leather and wood European accordion bellows, to double-action Japanese box bellows/later European great bellows that steadily moved air on both pull and push strokes. I know of two exceptions- the unique wind-blown blast of the original wootz steel smelter site, and the indigenous american huayra. Here's a (casually-googled) scholarly mention of the huayra from Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil by Lockhart and Schwartz:  The huayra design- something like a lightweight windcatcher-smelter often light enough to be broken down and transported directly to high-altitude mines- was very clever, in that it freed up hours of continuous labour necessary with a manual bellows, but it also unknowingly hobbled its users. The Spaniards found that the huayra provided enough of a blast under normal conditions to smelt the usual nonferrous metals handily, but it couldn't create sufficient heat to smelt iron ore. In the regions where iron was actively-mined- the mountains- the universal smelter design was one that just happened to run too cold to do anything to iron ore. The Spaniards, as mentioned, modified the design to make it iron-capable, but the necessary modifications weren't obvious to people who'd never smelted iron before. Ambrose Burnside fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Aug 5, 2017 |
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2017 03:29
|
|
|
2. IRT steel vs. bronze: You're all comparing bronze with steel, which is a false equivalency if we're actually talking about the historical period where bronze and iron were comparable "engineering materials". First off, there's usually a significant gap between when a given cultural complex (i keep using that term because this transcends individual cultures or peoples or nations) starts using iron and when it starts using steel. It makes sense, after all- producing iron isn't hard if your people have experience smelting copper and bronze, all the tools are there for you and only need a few modifications. Carburizing and tempering wrought iron to produce steel, on the other hand, requires a number of very specific processes to be done to it in a controlled and repeatable fashion, and without the benefit of modern metallurgical knowledge, good luck figuring that out. It seems like lots of cultures produced steel occasionally as a happy accident and gradually figured out how to turn iron into steel deliberately through trial and error that took some time to shake out. Note that a handful of known technological complexes, including the Indian and Subsaharan African ironworking complexes, produced steel directly from ore through various approaches- it's no surprise that both regions had reputations in antiquity for producing very fine steel. The second thing is that bronze, iron and steel involve different trade-offs in terms of manpower, skilled labour and cost. As mentioned, cuprous alloys are technically unchallenging to produce and form into finished goods because they melt at a low temperature and are easily-castable, but the metals involved-particularly tin- were scarce and expensive. Tin and arsenic-bearing copper alloys (which by itself smelted into arsenical bronze instead of copper) once formed an important anchor of very early Middle East trade routes between Egypt and the Mesopotamian civilizations. Iron, on the other hand, is cheap and plentiful, but making the stuff requires a lot of fuel, and then forming it into finished goods requires a bunch more fuel, a skilled artisan, and batch production a la casting is impossible. Making steel from iron- carburizing it for hours at a time- added another very labour- and energy-intensive step. A final, oft-overlooked factor is that cast bronze is homogenous and even in composition, while wrought iron- especially cheap wrought- could be very uneven and often featured a lot of non-metallic inclusions in the "finished stock" that could create big problems for high-performance end uses like weapons. So the end result of this is: yes, steel outperforms bronze in all ways that matter, that's true. That said, if you worked with iron there's little guarantee you can produce steel, and even if you can it may not be appropriate given the good being produced- and if we're talking bronze versus wrought iron, bronze won out. Work-hardened well-alloyed bronze had material properties superior to totally soft wrought iron, and it was far less likely to betray you and break in battle. A representative example of how this shook out is with the Roman empire. The Romans were making and working with iron during the early Republic, but evidence of steel being created deliberately doesn't turn up til much later in the Empire. At their height, Roman legions were typically equipped with wrought iron weapons and their officers and leadership with bronze equivalents- they were worth spending a few extra bucks on. As steel became more commonplace across Europe and bronze's supremacy fell by the wayside that dynamic went away, but it's emblematic of that weird transitional period, and of how bronze really can outperform "steel".
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2017 04:13
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 11:58 |
|
|
Bonus #3: So I mentioned arsenical bronze. This is pure conjecture, but it's really fun conjecture, so I choose to believe it. As I said, there are natural ores of copper that include a fair bit of arsenic. Arsenic added to a copper smelt produces arsenical bronze, a tough and high-performing bronze alloy that appears to have been in very high demand where its potential was realized in early antiquity. Arsenic ores may have also been deliberately added to arsenic-free copper smelts but no direct evidence of this exists. In any case, arsenic bronze performs well and frees you from having to secure a supply of tin, usually imported at significant cost, but it comes with costs of its own- chronic arsenic poisoning as a regular occupational disease among ancient metalworkers. Arsenic vaporizes at a low temperature, and any successful smelt of an arsenic-bearing ore will liberate some arsenic as a seriously-toxic gas. Arsenic poisoning causes- among other things- neuropathic degeneration, in which nerve damage causes a progressing loss of feeling and motor control starting with the extremities and creeping up. Because of the length of the nerves involved, the feet are usually afflicted first. Now look at Hephaestus, the Greek smith god. Aside from divinity and trade, his most notable trait is his lameness. He's even described as making himself a bronze wheelchair of sorts at one point. Whether you called him Weyland, Volund or something similar, the Germanic smith god was also described as being lame. Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, among others, had their own smith/artisan gods that were described as being disfigured or malformed in some obvious way, if not explicit lameness. Everywhere you go- before a certain period- it seems like smith gods had physical disabilities, and the civilizations where the smith god had that characteristic map well onto areas we know arsenical bronze was produced. So, we cannot ~firmly assert~ that a particular occupational disease profoundly shaped the mythologies of many European/Middle Eastern/North African civilizations during a very particular era of the Bronze Age, but dang, doesn't it all line up nice and plausible for us
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2017 04:36
|
|