Damascus steel

File: 8482eb286791695f0e1f70ab0c3861c1--swords-and-daggers-knives-and-swords.jpg (60KB, 532x800px) Image search: [Google]

60KB, 532x800px

>>34482185

>>34482185
Curved blades are inferior to straight blades.

It is not a coincidence the curved blades were only adapted by the end of the sword era where swords were no longer commonly used.

Does anyone know any good documentaries on Damascus steel?

>>34482203
Don't derail a good thread now.

>>34482248
My bad. These are nice swords which are called Tulwars. They were great for their time and based on the armour that the people in the land were wearing.

>>34482213
Walter Sorrells did a youtube vid on the autists who claim that it's not Damascus if it's folded and forged welded steel.

>>34482313
Is damascus only there to look good or does it strenghten the blade?

>>34482185
Allah bless vanadium

>>34482328
Folding steel is a way to make it stronger like the Japanese did when making swords. Using different types of steel during the folding process is what causes the pattern after etching. So I would say both is true. I'm definitely not an expert but every time the word Damascus is used the autists come out.

Pattern welded steel as seen on things like Anglo-Saxon swords and Seaxes was a way to make impure steel better.

Same reason why the Japanese did it, because Japanese iron is full of impurities, and if you make a sword out of that without folding it, you'll have a shit sword. Modern, high quality steel is superior in durability.

During the Victorian Era, Damascus steel and weapons made from it were what the memes about Katanas are today. Soldiers from Afghanistan telling how an officer from some regiment somewhere got his sword sliced through, his horse decapitated in one stroke, and was bisected by someone with a Damascus steel sword. Rifle barrels being sliced in half, etc.

File: xerox.jpg (70KB, 640x480px) Image search: [Google]

70KB, 640x480px

>>34482203
>curved blades were adapted by end of commonly used sword era

>>34482278
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilij
>used since 300 BC
kill yourself

>>34482328
>>34482401
Pattern-welding only makes steel stronger if the steel is poor quality to start with.
The purity of iron Europeans were working with post migration period was good enough to not warrant pattern-welding for the same results.

Modern steel is purer than both, despite what muh damascus and muh nippon faggots claim

>>34482185
I know this is probably going to get ignored and/or shitposted at to death, but:

Even allowing the assumption that real historical Damascus steel had any special advantages over and above Japanese steel (which was folded and hammered mainly to minimise impurities), the real advantage that Japanese swordsmiths had wasn't in the steel but rather in their quenching methods.

Basically, the Japanese approach of painting clay onto the blade at a precise thickness, heating it, and then quenching it in water gave Japanese swordsmiths much more fine grained control over the qeuenching process and therefore the properties of the finished blade than European or Middle Eastern smiths had.

European smiths, as far as I am aware, were limited to air cooling, oil immersion quenches and oil/sand quenches which gave very little control or especially adjustability over the quenching process and often tended to result in wildly unevenly hardened and grossly underhardened blades.

Conversely Japanese smiths were able to achieve ~60 HRC on the cutting edges of their blades even in period, and finely able to adjust the differential hardening across the other types of steel in a Katana.