BLACKSMITH REACTS TO FORGING IN FILM AND TV!!!
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- čas přidán 11. 06. 2024
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Silly Alec, that's how you make feather damascus 😉
Epstein didn't commit not exist
That is a funny comment 😂
It has the benefit of being super light weight.
that would be a san mai as it st only three layers
Adding the feather is the only way to as the swish sound when you swing the blade.
We need "Blacksmith tries blacksmithing from movies."
yes!!
Upvote
I want to see exactly what happens when you try to open top cast steel into a blade. Just for shits.
show them why it's a crap idea, yes!
yeah
There is a scene in LoTR Two Towers where the orcs seem to be mass producing swords by casting them. I figured they got really crappy weapons out of it, which was actually fine. It meant the orcs were a brute force solution, and if they got beaten by the good guys who had better armor and weapons and discipline, that would be thematically appropriate.
This is a good explanation for that, I like it. Their swords didn't even look particularly sharp, from what I remember.
@@dudetheman3 Honestly the orcs and uruks fighting with barely sharp sticks made of steel is very thematically in character.
Well, you would only cast bronze swords, but my explaination is that Saruman was both a wizard as well as having an superior understanding of engineering.
The LOTR scenes are 100% accurate to how Saruman and the elves smithed weapons.
@@patrickmcgever2736 If it's liquid at an orange glow, it's probably aluminium. Those are some advanced orcs.
The Kingdom Come: Deliverance scene does not surprise me with it's accuracy. I have personally talked with one of the guys involved in the development back in maybe 2012 or so, and those guys were crazy in the amount of realism they were going for. It was to the point where they had experts telling them which plants grew in the setting back in that day, and then they modeled those and only those, so that the nature would be as realistic as possible. And I'm pretty sure they had a similar approach to everything else. Quite impressive, really.
I remember hearing of them changing the colours of chickens because some specific colour wasn't around historically :D
God be with you, Henry!
That game was a gem of a game, surprised it never got bigger or more talked about. Diamond in the rough for sure!
@@caraboo-land6961 I think the incredibly buggy launch killed its potential hype. Great game now though, after all the patches
one of my fav game, yes it's buggy and yes you gotta invest a lot of time for the combat training not only your character but you too
i'm from asia and love seeing medieval times from the bulding armour and culture
"no way he could do this without a horse and carriage behind him to carry his balls"
Gold
Additionally, even Nordics gone a Viking wouldn't destroy a prospective slaves only real value- his hands for service. That bit with carrying the red hot iron is a death sentence in that era. FR
'Nuts'
deez nuts
I had to pause the video at that cause I completely lost it. fantastic bit of humor there.
@@fredericrike5974 I guess that's why that missionary was subsequently killed off screen in the show under the order of queen aslaug
Some of these are indeed ridiculous....however you forgot to factor in magic.
And that historical quenching was made to seem magic or overly complex for instance the Romans believed that you needed to quench iron in the urine of red headed boys to harden it all the way.
Narsil was forged with elven magic as much as forging.
I came here to talk about the magic, between the Valerian steel from GoT and Tolkien's elven smiths, that he just straight neglected.
I cast mending!
Ah , the old '' A wizard did it '' answer .
I worked at a forging company about 20 years, and we had a press operator that would look at his hand when doing his quality control. If his hand was smoking the forging was too hot. He had hands so rough when he shook my hand I thought he had gravel glued to it.
4:57 don't forget he built that suit from missiles he designed. He may not necessarily need an armor tool, if the parts are already in a similar shape?
"There is no way this is possible. You wouldn't be holding a bar of metal like that without a horse and carriage behind you to carry your nuts." LMFAO!
I about fell out of my chair on this part.
Yeah, that is amazing wit
There are stories of people who worked with branding irons for years eventually growing thick enough callouses that they no longer needed gloves. So it might be something you could work up to.
@@laurenceperkins7468 There's a reason these are stories without any kind of credible backup to them. No amount of callouses would allow you to carry something like that. I am an absolute amateur when it comes to forging. I found dirt with a high amount of clay in it, filtered it to make clay bricks, and built my own backyard forge with it. Then I used scrap wood to make charcoal, and scrap metal I found to try my hand at forging.
Words can't adequately express how hot iron becomes when heated to the point that it gives off that much light. Crank your oven up to about 500 degrees and imagine sticking your hand in and grabbing the heating element the stench of burnt flesh and hair would terrible. I wouldn't have been surprised to see visible bone beneath 3rd burns for the amount of time that dude was holding a piece of metal that was hundreds of degrees. Even the parts that aren't glowing would be ridiculously hot. Back when I was forging, I wouldn't even touch red hot metal with my forging gloves on. If I wasn't careful with how I used the tongs, I could start to feel the heat of their metal handles through my thick leather gloves. (That's what you get for making the tongs and gloves yourself though... lol.)
Working the forge often felt like standing inside of an oven set to max temperature. I loved doing it though but watching that guy holding his hands out to receive the metal had me writhing uncomfortably in my chair. I'd be amazed to hear of anyone who was able to keep holding it, instead of having the knee-jerk reaction of "touching a hot stove" and jerking away from it.
@@brianhsly I wouldn't expect a bar of glowing iron to be something a person could just hold onto forever. But I've seen people with callouses as thick as a pair of gloves on either their hands or feet depending on what kind of activity they get up to.
Even so, I wouldn't expect you could get your skin thick enough to buy you more than a couple seconds, at least not without it impeding your joints. Working a branding iron without gloves is doable, you've got three feet between the glowy bit and where you're holding it. My hands aren't quite tough enough, but it's in the realm of possibility. But grabbing the glowy bit itself? There's a reason these tests in the real world are generally "touch it", or maybe "pick it up". And usually not glowing hot.
I do wonder just how tough someone who worked at it could get their hands though. Like my mother has hardly any callous at all, but still handles hot pans straight out of the oven sometimes. Turns out she gets away with it because the circulation in her hands moves so fast it acts as coolant.
But Alec, you forgot to take into account the blacksmith's use of magic. And Hollywood likes using aluminum for casting molten steel.
Also mixtures with lead and tin
Isn't it tin they tend to use, since I think that flows a bit more easily/at a lower temp.
See, though, aluminum doesn't glow when it's molten! At least, not without being WAY hotter than its melting temperature.
I feel like it must be copper or something. I have to wonder if this trope of 'casting swords' is _somehow_ a holdover from the bronze age, where casting WAS how swords were made.
@@Earthenfist aluminum does glow when at molten temp but its very hard to see in daylight.
if you do it in a dimly lit area you'll se it.
thats exactly why its not accurate blacksmithing. hollywood should just film alec steele making swords. his video editing skills are better than hollywoods blacksmithing scenes.
Would love to see you experiment with some open casting of molten steel, setting out with the goal of proving yourself wrong and actually finding a way to make it work!
He could do a comparison of a bronze sword vs a steel sword that way
I don't think you understand. Casting steel is a horrible idea in the first place compared to forging. Watch lindybeige's video on it.
@@BusinessWolf1 No, I'm aware it doesn't work, I'm saying he should compare it exactly for that reason
Can't be done. It's not a work or skill issue it's a chemistry/metallurgy reason. Cast steel has a different crystal structure than forged or machined from billet steel. It will never be strong enough to be suitable for quality tools, blades or load/pressure bearing firearm components.
@@DarkAvatar1313 Damn you said it way better than me
The broken sword from Lord of the Rings appears to have "too much" broken off metal because the handle and the blade have been placed closer together than they were before it was broken.
And then there is the whole "Elvin magic" portion of the reforging that Alex obviously has not learned yet. :)
@@sithus1966 I don't think the Keebler elves make appointments with Britons, do they? I'm sure they certainly do not share their secrets.
The fun part of that scene is watching so many "experts" over the years scream, "That's NOT how you reforge a sword! That won't work!". Umm, I guess none of those "experts" have ever been to a museum, where repaired swords like that are present. :D
@@TacDyne Rivendell Elves, not Keebler.
Great to see some of those pieces, and cool to hear you namecheck LindyBeige! Also, as a games maker as well as a CZcamsr, I'm pleased to see the sword in the game scene being authentic!
That game actually is historically accurate.
@@SnowTheKitsune there are domě mistakes in historicaly accuracy in KCD such as visor hinges on bascinets, but overall it's realy fun to play.
You are a game maker?
@@esben181 he is Jason Kingsley, founder of Rebellion Development (sniper elite etc.)
@@LastBastion SIR Jason Kingsley
I think Alec should attempt an open-top casting, even if it's just something small, and see how well he can do :D
I was thinking the same thing. Try recreating some of those cast sword moments. It be fun to watch, even knowing it might not work.
Absolutely he should try to make a casted sword or two and then test it against a forged sword to show why its a terrible idea.
Right, would be awesome series of video. Makng the mold, melting down a sword, and then pour it out, simple
You realize he would need a fucking foundry to melt steel/iron, right?
Seconded. Everyone is so sure it will fail.... But actually watching it fail would make for a great video
The feather part...
early blacksmiths would forge weapons with pieces of bone, fur or feathers folded in between layers. It actually made a crude carbon steel. It was believed to put the spirit of that animal into the weapon
Oh, goodness no. They did not.
@@magicponyrides Vikings most certainly did use bone in their smithing, I don't know why you're so insistent on something you don't actually know
@@sineadfigiel5946 If you're going to make statements like that, at least have the decency to back them up with a source. Whilst I have no doubt that bones were used in some aspects of smithing [as a professional smith I use their modern decendants frequently], it was almost certainly not just folding a bone or feather into a piece of iron. In Theophilus' "On Divers Arts" written in 1122, he notes that the process of hardening files and gravers would be done by burning ox horn, scraping off the char and mixing it with salt. Then grinding the resulting mixture and coating the surface of red hot iron before reheating it. If that sounds at all familiar, it's the process called Case Hardening. It makes a thin layer of harder steel at the surface of the product. Repeating the process deepens the layer.
All the sources I can find for "Vikings used bone in their blacksmithing" are echo-chamber repeats of each other's articles and some dude on reddit.
@@sineadfigiel5946 source:trust me bro
@@smitty169 It would be bones crushed to power, or feathers burned to ash. Basically just powder forging, but with extra steps. Obviously nobody would be stupid enough to leave macroscopic chunks of organic matter in their sword steel. They were superstitious Vikings, not idiots.
In the Lord Of The Rings scene, the sword is shattered in multiple pieces, when it's laid on the mantle there is the two longuest "pieces" on one side, and the rest on the other. The sword is very long. In the next scene where they are forging it, they have attached one of the pieces, not the entirety of it, so they are still hitting the two just "forged" pieces.
Here's the real reason for the feather.
When you're making iron like with bloom iron, it has a very low carbon amount, the Vikings found that when they put a feather in the hot iron it would make the metal stronger, they believed that it was like a blessing or something, but it was actually the added carbon making the iron into a rudimentary steel.
There's also rumors that some cultures made swords better by quenching the forged sword in a captive or slave which supposedly made it better. This might make sense if that process allowed some carburization of the surface steel, effectively giving the sword a case hardening.
I've also heard that both Europeans and Japanese independently reached the conclusion that 0.8% weight-% carbon gives optimal hardness (although they obviously had no idea how much carbon was in the steel). Nowadays we know that's because lower carbon means less hardening potential, and higher means you will have retained austenite in the steel, which is relatively soft. But nowadays we also know that if you deep cool the steel you can force more of the austenite to turn into martensite, which is extremely hard, so with deep quenching you can utilize higher carbon content to reach even higher hardness. That of course also leads to higher risks with brittleness, so not something to be recommended for hobby forgers, but can work in modern high quality steel making.
They also sometimes used bone. With a similar ritualistic view that ancestral spirits dwelled with the metal. When I was just early steel.
@@emperror85 that would suck BT to be that slave, only plus side would be the hot sword will cauterize the slice hole so they wouldn’t bleed out. 😁🤣🤣😬😬😬😬😬😬😬🤓 🔥 🗡.
u sure? usually you reduce the carbon amount of iron in order to make steel:)
@@TheSevanthNinja they still use bone for colour case hardening of rifle/pistol receivers and the like.
If you've watched Ragnarok, he is making Mjolnir. The feather is ceremonial/magic so that the his hammer will fly.
Does that mean if I make a hammer and slap a fin on it, it'll be able to swim?
i gotta say, the forging in Kingdom Come: Deliverence realy impressed me when they showed that the blacksmith had to outsource the crossgaurd too a gold smith, as one would do with such an ornate cross gaurd, something media doesn't achnolage, there is a notable diffrence between gold smithing, and weapon/tool smithing, and often did people not know both, and still is quite rare for such today.
very true. Not any goldsmith at that, a master goldsmith.
@@bertilandersson6606 I mean, why whould a master blacksmith ask the help of anyone less?
It was also very common for high-quality blades to be mass produced in places like Toledo with lots of specialized equipment and then shipped elsewhere and the hilts would be added locally.
Flat blades pack nicely for long trips, and any apprentice blacksmith can manage a half-decent handguard.
Very good point! Btw, it's acknowledge* just so you know :)
that's the most creatively written "acknowledge" I've ever seen.
I can't believe the forge where I used to work for almost two and a half years was featured in your video. It was the Ragnarok clip. That very anvil is the one I have used quite a lot :D
I was with the crew when they were doing rehearsal. It's in Odda Norway.
Reforging Narsil:
"But magic..."
*insert "Thank You" gif
Did you notice he didn’t have anything else to say about Narsil’s reforging.
Alot of these clips are swords that are magic and/or are not made of earthly metals.
I know it's a joke comment... but Imma woosh myself anyway.
Magic in books and movies is an artificial system that follows a certain rule set established by author. Doesn't need to be as rule heavy as math (tho it can be), just needs to be internally consistent. If you establish that magic can heal someone, you better not forget to use healing magic when someone gets wounded, otherwise reader will call BS when a character dies from wounds. That alone makes most "but magic" arguments not work.
Tolkien established that you can use magic while forging, but he never directly described the process of reforging Narsil, or if it involved magic. So for all we know the elven smiths in books reforged the sword as Alec described to be the correct method, with no magic involved. Books are safe. Movies however.... yeah, the use of magic was never implied through dialogue or shown, so the movie version is BS. No "but magic" can save that one. Even as a kid not understanding blacksmithing I remember thinking that hammering two hot pieces side by side shouldn't make them stick together. Nerd rant end.
The movies are still awesome tho, and Anduril is fing beautiful.
@@georgesomething ...but magic, exotic steel, Elven craftsmanship handed down through the ages, and pretty sparks..? 😄
I hear what you're saying and indeed, it's to mock movie magic on top of fantasy magic. In the context of the film, it just needs to look good on camera, and make sense within the lore enough to not break suspense of disbelief.
Nothing beats scenes in which blacksmith is CASTING a sword xD
On solid stone for some reason.
I mean if it’s bronze that’s ok though I think
@@nick_steele9790 but its not, its meant to be steel
Casting an iron sword. Straight from ore. In an open mold. And the liquid "iron" glows in a nice orange while slowly creeping over the rough stone. And after that the crossguard and hilt get put on before they beat it with a hammer on an anvil. This would be the worst sword in all of history if this wasn't physically impossible. (When iron/steel glows orange it isn't liquid yet.)
@@michaandrzejewski8445 oh I know that, I meant a movie could do it with bronze if they were dead set on it
the game of thrones melting sword is even weirder when you know that its valyrian steel, which is basically magic damascus, and even after melting and recasting it retains the damascus pattern
With a bit of poetic licence, one could explain this without appealing to magic. One could assert that there's some sort of spontaneous symmetry-breaking that occurs in that type of steel that produces that layered structure. Look up "Lüders bands" for some poetic inspiration.
@@bpj1805 This thread is the intersection of two contentious topics.
1. The TV reforging of ice is inconsistent with the Book description, which involves forging and long forgotten esoteric stuff that only someone trained in the free cities would know how to do.
2. What knife makers call Damascus steel is actually just pattern welding. True Damascus steel was crucible steel with impurities in it. Smiths found that they could get it into some sort of eutectoid phase transition by keeping it at the right temperature, producing wood patterns. Eventually, they got steel without the impurities (Tantalum or maybe Mo) and they couldn't make it anymore.
To try to rationalize the scene from either GOT canon or real life is wrong. Then again, a modern knife maker isn't going to be entirely right about obtaining a Damascus steel pattern after melting the blade.
@@hypothalapotamus5293 Vanadium. It was vanadium that caused the pattern. 0.008%.
EDIT: The actual Damascus pattern from Saladin's mines, that is.
Narsil is reforged from multiple pieces, and thats why theres still a break after the initial forge weld. As the blade was broken by Lord Sauron, it didn't just break in two, but the point where Sauron stepped on the blade, it shattered into multiple pieces. It's quite a long sword this, as shown later in the movie when Lord Elrond presents it to Aragorn:)
Keep also in mind that despite this depicting forging as you know it, this is also a semi-magical process as it's elves doing the smithing.
Even Elrond wasn't sure he could reforge Narsil until he actually pulled it off, which lends credence to the idea that it isn't ordinary metal, even by elven standards. Elrond is a ring bearer, and a might elf lord, after all. He didn't just put that particular handicraft project off for a thousand years because finishing it would probably mean losing his only daughter the same way he lost his brother.
It may even be Anglachel, the lost sword of the Numenorian kings, gifted to them by the mad dark elf smith Eol. Eol forged the black swords from a cursed meteorite, and took the secrets of his method to his grave. Even elven smiths could never replicate his process, at least not prior to the reforging of Narsil.
Also, the soul energy infused into magical swords and rings is widely noted to make them resistant to heating and melting. Only dragon fire is hot enough to melt a ring of power, and only Mount Doom can melt the One Ring. So, it's not too much of a stretch to think that Narsil may actually be several times hotter than it appears, and show only minimal signs of it. --Doubly so if it's reforging is a difficult process that requires much study and preparation. Though, rings of power seem to demonstrate the opposite behavior, glowing hot under normal flames, but refusing to deform or melt until exposed to monstrous extremes of heat.
"They're quenching it in snow???" he says
as if he hasn't literally done that himself back in the Montana workshop
(although that could have just been for the camera/us)
He's forgotten the Riddle of Steel, cast it aside and left it on the battlefield.
Wait, maybe you are onto something, maybe in movies they do things for the camera/us as well!
Alec: "I have no idea how this is possible. Ice doesn't catch on fire."
Methane clathrates: "Said no one, ever."
🤣🤣
Yep but the purpose of this is still questionable?
I posted separately that maybe the barbarians baptized their swords in beer. Hot metal would vaporize the alcohol, and maybe the vapors would self-ignite against a hot part of the blade. Or... they just did something that looked "cool" for a movie.
@@cycleboy8028 they probly got confused watching blacksmiths quench in oil tbh
the only reason ice would catch on fire like that is if the water is horibly uncleen, and condisdering how clear said water was, that would be doubtful. there should have been no reason for so much fire, steam yes, fire no.
Fact of the matter is: that was Tony's first time forging.
My thought aswell
1:15
The Titanium can be reinforced
with low temparature quenching into the liquid nitrogen.
The color will be golden,
and the super harden surface will be made.
Another reason forging using both fire and ice
is for squeesing the alloy internal structure,
so that the physical proterty will be tough and hard to be broken.
that would mean the materia would be super brittle. it would possibly leave the core soft enough to bend, but the edge so damn hard it would chip and shatter apon any force of impact. this is the same exact thing that katanas use. differentail hardening. where some parts are softer then others. the spine is left soft and the edge is hard. the problem is, it would be like wrapping a candy cane with taffy. once you snap the candycane, it will hold together by the taffy but it wil bend.
.
if you are talking about something like a prince ruperts droplet, that will also be a terrible idea, again it will be super strong in the spine, but it will be extremely hard on the edge. this will cause your blade to not only crack a lot easier, but shatter instead of simply bend. theres a reason why all good quality swords use the same material, hardness, toughness, and process to be made. if all the blade is one single hardness/ toughness, there is no point that can fail more then any other point. you have to find the balance between hardness and toughness. to tough, and it will bend and not spring back, to hard, and it will snap. in this way of using the pressure to "hold the internal structure" it will simply chip and then crack. that kind of thing is used in bearings, or anvils where you want it to last a long time. but you know you wont be applying enough force to it to crack it. a soft glowing hot piece of metal wont crack the anvil when struck. that also can apply simply to asthetics. for a sword it would be garbage. and would lead to lots of issues. but thats not to say there's no use for it. as I said, bearing, anvils, and some kitchen knives with this treatment that won't be beaten on, just used to cut would work. although im not sure you want a titanium knife for actual kitchen use. there's other problems with that.
I would love to see Alec doing a video of what happens when you do those Bad forging ideas like quenching in ice/snow/water but safely!
But quenching in water is alright or do you mean just ice water
He has quench in snow
I wonder if snow wouldn't quench quite allright though. Propably not as good as water, but perhaps decent enough, considering its colder than water and one could move it around in the snow to keep it contacting with the steel.
@@aohdan5713 ice water but I meant like a side by side with oil and such to see what are the pros and cons for doing it in certain ways...
if Iremember correctly it was for a Steele vs Statler . he hardened a knife or a pointy thing quicly
I get so frustrated with things like these scenes. When I was doing some filming for scrap Kings earlier in the year one of the producers wanted the opening shot to be me beating a piece of round bar on an anvil, I went to do it but stopped and said "I can't do this unless it's red hot because if I saw it on tv it would drive me mad" 😂 in fairness they were more than happy to take the input.
If it's mild steel and not too big, you can technically beat it until it becomes red hot!
I will say that the entire point of the GoT sword "ice" was that it was absurdly large
Yeah if you see Ned stark holding that bad boy it's massive I believe it could make 2 longswords and leave you enough for a dagger or something after haha
Fire and ice I always took as a analogy to the structural makeup of the steel ice being hard and ridged while fire is soft and flexible.
hey break a sword and try different ways to reforge it, like direct welding , or your method or other methods
oooh, this!^
I bet they have a few broken knives and swords around... Less now that Will is in his own shop though... 😂 🤣 😁
I can guarantee direct welding will do nothing but bend the blade. Ive tries repairing a friends machete this way. It didnt work at all
There's really no need. Traditionally there were only two ways to deal with reforging a broken blade, and trying to weld the bits back together is not one of them. One way is to simply forge the broken bits separately into smaller blades, (ex: A long sword broken at about 2/3 up the blade, the tip would make a decent knife and the main mass of the blade could be reshaped into a short sword) the other is as he suggested, which is to lump it all back together into a big brick, throw it all back into the fire and effectively start from scratch forging a new blade. A weld is always going to be a weak spot and if you do that with a blade all that means is that even a very slight stress on the blade will cause it to snap right where you "repaired" it.
@@olinseats4003 Yeah, it snapped where it snapped the first time for a reason and just sticking it back together again doesn't fix that reason.
If you were in a hurry you might consider just overlapping the pieces a few inches to weld them back together and then redrawing just that portion of the blade, but it'll obviously be a repair job and likely won't work well.
Alec: Makes fun of quenching in snow
Also Alec: Has Quenched in snow
I was referring to an old Steele vs Stelter episode btw
7:42 i remember my work shop teacher saying "dont try picking up glowing metal, its a lot "heavier" than u would think" and that was bc someone was welding some metal tubing and after it, they went a head and picked it up while it was still glowing hot and drop it immediately
one that really got me was in lord of the rings when the orcs were open top casting their weapons, but i figured they are all disposible soldiers and making quality weapons was a waste when a sharp piece of metal will still kill
Skallagrim did a wonderful video on the Uruk Hai chopper, and you're right, the idea is they can make lots of weapons at once, then quickly sharpen and temper them, effectively making them the fantasy version of an AK-47, cheap, simple to use and rather effective
Yeah, that's one instance where I think the idea of straight casting a sword could potentially "work". If all you need is a flat metal bar (maybe not even proper steel) that you then grind a basic edge into, and you need to make a ton of them quickly, I could see casting being a workable approach. Probably would be some form of investment casting rather than open-top, but that wouldn't look particularly interesting on-camera.
Worth noting that the original LotR trilogy had a number of very skilled & knowledgeable swordmakers involved in the project, who seemed to have some amount of creative input.
@@magoshighlands4074 Worth noting that Kalashnakovs actually requires some pretty advanced tooling due to the advanced sheet metal construction that the original design required. While the later AKMs did become cheap to manufacture in volume, it took the Soviets until nearly the 1960s to get the production processes worked out. Most true AK-47s had machined receivers, and weren't produced or used in very high volumes due to this.
I doubt in anyway with that kinda casting you would get usable blades out of. Not even crude orc weapons
@@lalli8152 You can cast swords. It's almost never going to be open-top casting like you see in films & TV, and how good the end product is depends on the type of blade and the material you're using, but it is certainly possible. I've seen some pretty decent bronze short swords made using a sand casting process, for example.
I'll be doing my university dissertation on different steels used in knife making , analysing the mechanical properties of that steel and at the end manufacturing a knife . I wanted to include a section on Damascus steel and compare the properties of that to the properties of the monosteel that is used to create Damascus. Can you please upvote so alec sees this ? I'd love to get him included so he can send some small Damascus samples and then sharing the learnings with a video to all of you .
It's widely known that damascus is just for looks, good quality monosteel has superior qualities.
@@Bramble20322 its not so much about finding the best steel you can use , its about finding out how different Damascus is compared to the monosteel its made from , how does that affect its crystal structure etc. There aren't many research papers out there about this !
Are you looking at pattern welded “Damascus” or also looking at “Wootz” crucible steel?
@@ivanheffner2587 mainly pattern welded steel
I had such a laugh at Highlander when the guy is at the remnants of his ancient forge, from when the 1500's? and he digs out a London pattern anvil . . .
Quite love the Lindybeige callout, been a fan of his stuff for years. Probably one of the first channels I ever subscribed to.
I was thinking "He's got to talk about Conan the Barbarian" 1st clip starts,"Yes! But also no, not that one, I meant the good one!" Last clip starts "YES!!!"
"I've been blacksmithing since I was a small child."
Are you not a small child anymore?
Keep on crushing it 👊🏼🐻
No he's a big child now... 😂
Just small
@@19marmot95 Lol, my hubby likes to say that guys never really grow up. They just get more expensive toys. 🤣🤣
@@warriormaiden9829 yea... Boys become 7 years old, then they only grow :p :D
About the feather: Japanese smiths put straw in between layers when forging their swords. It acts as a flux, and replaces little bits of lost carbon.
It’s quite likely a feather could do the same.
I could be wrong but I was under the impression that when they were doing the first few welding heats on the tamahagane, they used paper and clay on the outside to keep it together then straw on top of that acting as flux.
@@CarterMalmquist exactly, the straw is not put between the layers. The first welds are done as you described the tamahaned bits are wrapped with paper and a clay slurry. Then later after it a steel bar wrapping is done straw / burnt straws and a clay slurry. But never between the layers.
I've seen people putting paper or other easily burnt materials in canister damascus, with the intention being that it'll burn when the canister is heated and use up some of the oxygen inside, resulting in less oxidization of the steel and therefore less inclusions. Maybe that's what the feather's supposed to be for?
Straw or feathers between layers would absolutely ruin your workpiece. Japanese smiths use straw to infuse carbon into the outer surface of the steel to increase the overall amount of carbon in formerly low carbon steels. Because of the folding to hundreds of layers, the carbon diffuses almost evenly troughout the whole workpiece. That's why you they straw. To increase the percentage of carbon, but never between layers while folding. The feather might be just religious or it may contain minerals which work as a mild flux **after** it burned completely.
@@Taunus-Tim I assume the feather is just „Hollywood“
Alec looking at the Iron Man faceplate: "Looking at the finished piece there, that
doesn't look like something that came off a blacksmith's anvil."
Me: "Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!"
10:52 There is another big disadvantage to using an I beam as an anvil: The noise.
I used one for a while, and it did the job well enough, but you could hear me working from a mile away.
I can still hear the ringing of my smaller one to this day. I haven't owned it now for 20 years.
Highlander has a sword forging part after his katana was broken.
I loved the ridiculous forging in Outlander (2008) where they forge some mystery metal from a crashed spacecraft into a sword at a black heat and it comes out of the quench sharpened and polished :D
I mean... there's technically about enough steel in a great sword to make two long swords, but only if you're accounting for zero lost material in the process.
plus the fact that Ice was absolutely MASSIVE
Yeah In that case the original greatsword is massive and I think it's even remarked at some point that it was so large only someone extremely strong could swing it.
Then when it's melted the swords are not the same size if I remember right Jamie gets an adult sized sword and Joffery gets a smaller sword because he's a teenager and his is more a status item.
A long sword weighs 4-5 pounds. A great sword weighs 5-6 pounds. But that's real life, not that TV series about floppy wieners... oh, and thrones or something.
@@TacDyne
Long swords actually weigh more like 2.5 to 4 lb.
Great swords typically weigh more 4.5 to 9 lb.
Both of these terms are super vague in practice, but we're generalizing, and I'm not an expert or even amateur at historical sword classification.
the fact you are so comfortable wielding that hammer so close to that laptop shows me how confident you are in your abilities
“They’ve also got oil all over their anvil, which is just dangerous and serves no purpose whatsoever”. Cue Will spraying WD40 on the power hammer dies for them CZcams views.
I don't know about the feather but I am aware of a viking blacksmiths ritual where a sword would be blessed with various herbs and occasionally animal blood from a slaughtered livestock. Blood had little use to the vikings beyond ritual significance, but even then, I've never heard or seen evidence of that any one from that period would do the blessing mid forging or put the sacrificed materials into the blade because even in the 11th century, they understood that impurities in the blade will cause it to fail, which considering that only wealthy vikings could afford a sword, not exactly something they wanted to risk.
Vikings used animal bones to strengthen their steel. They believed that sacrificing the animals and using the bones made the steel stronger and "imbueing the spirits into the sword".
Which in fact! it did! However it was not because of the spirits (lol) but by the carbon, which comes from burning the bones, that made the steel stronger.
Vikings would have eaten every last drop of blood in reality, as people still do all around the world. It is full of nutrients and if theres one thing for sure about the viking age apart of american gamerfantasy, it is that nothing went to waste.
But indeed there are theories that in earlier days knifes and sword were hardened in blood. Not for sacrificial reasons, but because it works fabulously. Todays best specialty hardeningfluids are emulsions of watery and oily components. Just like blood.
Having watched the show. They were forging Thors Hammer and the feather is to make the hammer fly.
Blood was also used for food.
It could have been to keep the oxygen out from between the 2 pieces. Kinda like some people put paper in canister Damascus.
The Conan ones are faithful to the books which have the Cimmerians (Conan's people who are all killed off with Conan being the last of them) having "secret" forging techniques to make steel blades that are strong enough to cut through regular iron swords that the rest of the people use. The whole fire and ice thing comes about from them living in the frozen north. (I loved reading the Conan books when I was younger and I think I have read every one of them).
So in the aviking age, it was believed that weapons and armor could be imbued with the Spirits of the Gods while the the arms were being forged. The feather, if it was an Eagle feather, would be in reference to the "Corpse Swallower" Hræsvelgr who took the form of an Eagle.
The Vikinga were a fascinating bunch. They weren't the only society to do that in the past.
Ok but Alex have you ever considered that open top molds look really cool and therefore the blade is gonna be extra strong?
I would love to see more old footage of tiny Alec swinging a big hammer haha. Keep up the content man!
In the world of TV, Movies, and Games they tend to air on the side of "rule of cool" or what looks better for what they want. now for the LotR bit the sword was shattered so it was not them putting 2 pieces together but several, as well as shots do not always end up in order during editing.
Smithing in a hand made kiln is relaxing imo, creating something from rocks is magical in a way
Alec: Open-top sword casting doesn't work.
Also Alec: We're almost certainly gonna totally try open-top sword casting in another video!
Good opportunity to prove a point.
saying and doing are two different things, he’ll prove that it won’t work while doing something that nobody else actually did.
the fact that he may enjoy doing it is beside the point
I cant wait to see you get more into the engineering side of things. Its like watching you move from the industrial age to the modern age. You are gonna kill it.
Do the one on Avatar! the fourth episode of Book Three: Fire of Avatar: The Last Airbender
I’ve never given two shits about blacksmithing. This channel changes that. Very interesting and entertaining to watch.
I remember seeing The Hunted as a kid and thought the knife making scene was the coolest thing ever, I found a piece of metal and made a little fire with a friend and tried it ourselves. It of course was impossible and it quickly escalated into just setting random things on fire and eventually we had a little explosion on our hands but that's a whole other story..
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is based on accurate historical contemnt.
This. Also, you don't need to be super conservative with your coal if you can just send your good-for-nothing son to beat up the local drunkard for Groschen and fetch more coal from that money.
One of the best games I've played
@@Chris-lc3wi Besides, if you befriend charcoal burners you get charcoal at a decent price. Or even better, just steal it!
@@emperror85 Daddy won't benefit from that though. :/
@@Chris-lc3wi Daddy not gonna benefit from much after the prologue huh?
I dipped out from the channel about 10 months after you moved to America. When I saw the "expert reacts to" craze, i immediately thought you should do one.(tho i never came back to request it) Glad you're finally doing one.
To be fair, in GoT they melt a even bigger than usual claymore in 2 longswords, being one thin and custom to a 13y short guy.
The scene where hiccup makes toothless's tail in how to train your dragon.
There's a TV show called forged in fire, its pretty cool
Pretty sure everyone knows
The second Game of Thrones one is explained as "magic metal." It's a sort of riff off of REAL Damascus steel, as opposed to current pattern welding methods, in that we've lost the process for making REAL Damascus steel. In the show / book, that magic metal, called Valyrian Steel, can be recast into new forms, can be forged, and almost never needs to be sharpened. But the society that knew the magic (and they were created with spells) to make the metal disappeared in a calamity. So no one knows how to make new Valyrian Steel, just how to remake existing weapons into new ones.
Exactly 💯
If by riff you mean cpy and paste then sure, unfortunately if look close enough, you start to see a lot of GoT is just ripped directly from histpry
Is it really said to be recastable in the books? I assumed that's just a silliness from the show. Reforging makes far more sense, since you'd keep much of the properties of the material; melting it down is kind of silly and would probably make it extremely brittle unless the GoT people already know how to make proper steel from molten iron... but then why would re-cast Valyrian steel be better? At best, you'd get some unexpected impurities (like vanadium or chromium) that would make for better steel, but that should still leave the "child" blades seriously inferior to the original.
@@LuaanTi All explained away with "magic."
We haven't lost the physical process for making Damascus steel. But it's incompatible with modern machine forging, and the mines that gave it its unique alloy composition played out centuries ago, so there'd have to be an expensive analysis and reformulation step involved if you want an exact match.
I'm of Viking descent and studied some of the histories of my heritage, one of the things I came across was the feather during the forging process of weapons. They would use a Raven/Crow feather as a symbol of Odin, The All-Father. It was believed that if a weapon or tool had a feather in it during the forging process that it would make the weapon more deadly to his/her enemy and protect the wielder, and for tools it would increase it's longevity and resource production in the fields.
I love the sarcasm at the end when he says he's gonna open cast blades. 😆
There is a forging scene in the movie “The North Face” it’s a German film about mountaineers. They forge some of their own equipment.
ok, the laws of physics in Middle Earth are not the same as they are in Norfolk, so the forging prosess will be different, this is highlighted by the creation of a ring that when you pop it on you turn invisable, and eventually turn into Gollom, where as on regular earth, when you put the ring on her finger she eventually does turn into Gollom but unfortuanly remains visable.
The cooling iron in snow thing I'd buy actually. Am studying farriery and we've actually been doing that quite a lot with horseshoes lately. More convenient than asking the customer for a bucket of water haha
The only thing I would say in defense of the open top pouring, which isn't really a defense at all, is that the nature of the material being used was supposed to be special. Valerian Steel in GOT, and I seem to recall some special meteoric iron in Conan. It was also accepted in GOT that the knowledge to properly forge the material had been lost and the best they could do was recast it, relying on the steel's incredible strength to make a decent blade. Likewise, in Conan I think his blade was special because everyone else was still using bronze or something. Least the version I remember.
“Without a horse and carriage behind you to carry your nuts”
- The Alec Steele
we need some mythbusting episodes, like showing what actually happens when you open cast a sword
8:29
In Game of Thrones' defence, the sword that was melted, Ice, is a two-handed greatsword and it is used to make two longswords
I just realized that all the channels who do this kind of things: the thief reacting to heist movies, the fbi agent reacting to fbi related movies, etc. None of them invited you to react to forging scenes. I mean YOU!! FOR XXXX SAKE! and you did it yourself so I love the video. Please react to every movie scene ever that involves you re expertise. I will watch it :)
This has been the first “a someone reacts to a something” that has been genuinely educational! Well done 👍
I see you haven't spent much time on CZcams. There are plenty of "X Expert Reacts to Y" these days that are both entertaining and genuinely educational. Such as Corridor Crew, Dr Mike, Dr Hope etc.
Makes sense that KCD would be some of the most accurate stuff there, they did make a point of the game being as historically correct as possible.
They did indeed make a big deal of the original great sword being ridiculously large before reforming into a long and a short.
As I understood it the father in Kingdom Come was a former swordsmith who worked the forge mainly as a toolsmith for the castle and village and only forged the sword as a favour for the lord. He would have used the forge mainly with his son for simpler stuff, so more space to work parallel might make sense.
How about the forging of the axe "Stormbreaker" in Avengers: End game
That is in "Avengers: Infinity War"
Infinity War... And Eitri didn't forge StormBreaker... He used a "closed" mold to cast it. It's one of the "in-accurcies" of Thor's weapons. Mjolnir and StormBreaker were "cast" from the heart of a dying star. Not "forged."
stormbreaker does not count, it can be cast, you cant really suggest that the material of stormbreaker can get brittle
@@blairdiviak1978 Yep. It's made out of URU, which in the Marvel universe is basically the magic version of Adamantium. It is cast but maybe URU ends up stronger that way. It isn't steel, so maybe it doesn't need forged. Also SPACE MAGIC.
@@MrClarkisgod magic being the key in all of this... Lol!
This is awesome Alec, such a fun way to learn about blacksmithing!
With the feather I think its implied that the feather was added for carbon since it's bloomery iron (not like that amount of carbon would do much) but then when it goes from flat to square it's probably meant to imply a folding process has happened to spread out said carbon throughout the iron.
I remember listening to the commentary of the original Conan the Barbarian (I was literally obsessed with that movie in my youth), and the director stated that he hated the opening credit scene! Basically, he spoke to the production company about what he wanted, and they found a traditional blacksmith to do it. Unfortunately, the production company told the director that they didn't like "his version", and actually did their own filming because "it was more dramatic" with open casting and all the flames, then cut the male actors little snippets into it. Luckily, it was the only meddling the production company did.
Another fun little note...the director actually served in Vietnam, and a lot of the defenses for the final battle were designed utilizing pungie sticks and booby traps he saw the VC use.
7:17 Ha! Same, I start feeling uncomfortable holding something that hot once the luminescence is a foot away from me, and that's if I'm wearing gloves... Yeah that dude's hands would be toast
Ice (the sword being reforged into two swords, not that quenching business) was said to be stupidly large and at the end of it's life was mostly used like a guillotine letting the weight of the thing take it cleaning through condemned necks at the block.
Perhaps the show should have portrayed it as bigger before it was melted down. Also it's magic fantasy "Valerian Steel" so some hand waving may be implied. ;-)
Alecs on target with his assessment. He knows his Craft.
I'm working on writing a fantasy novel, and one of the main characters is a blacksmith. The way she does stuff is heavily inspired by this channel, though the magic system gives her access to tools that don't exist IRL. She uses a hammer that stores kinetic energy in "kinesis cells", which it can use to strike with more force than should be physically possible for a human. She also has a flying, collapsible anvil, and a forge heated by dragon fire.
Note that I wrote this before actually watching the video as I don't currently have time to do so.
OK SO WHO WANTS TO SEE SOME STEELE MYTH BUSTING?
You should try some of the techniques used such as the casting then quinching in ice. Basically show what would actually happen if you tried some of the things. I'm thinking casting then final forge quench temper in ice might work depending on the steel but as you said there is alot of unnecessary work. In the Conan movies it shows a sort of middle ages time frame, which means labor is very expressive which makes alot of that unlikely. However it would be interesting to see what would happen trying some of those techniques....
Alec Steele “bladesmithing MYTHBUSTERS”
Heh...could call it Smithbusting.
I could just imagine Alec hitting his laptop with the hammer by accident
The scene with the man holding the hot iron is an example of trial by ordeal, which was common in the medieval era. They would hold a hot iron and walk up and down the church/ holy place in which the trial would take place, and then their hands would be bandaged. If your hands were healing smoothly 3 days later, then you were innocent. If not, you were guilty. I am not quite sure what it was being used for in the context of the movie, but there you go.
Best spoken blacksmith ever
I love how Alec's voice gets squeaky when he is annoyed. Also can anyone imagine how bad it would be to be punched by a blacksmith?!🤕
Yes. If the smith doesn't hold back, the fight is usually over after the first punch.
Just the other day I thought that about the women that make big clay pots; they could pack a pretty good punch 🙂
How about the blacksmith scene in “The Highlander?”
Don't even look at Highlander 3, you shattered a whole sword, and then go halfway around the world to uncover a chunk of steel made ages ago, and somehow that had exactly enough material to make a new sword?
@@cocodojo the block was made specifically to used as a replacement blade, or at least thats my interpretation of the flash back scene.
@@chadfalardeau5396 That's how the movie conveys the reason for the block of steel, but still, that thing's in pristine condition after all that time without even a spot of rust? And it has just exactly enough material for a whole replacement sword even though we've watched all the forging done and know there's a lot of waste due to oxidization.
@@cocodojo I just chalk it up to movie logic, at least there was some realism
@@chadfalardeau5396 Fair enough, but him making a spare ingot ages ago, just for the purpose of the off chance the sword would be broken badly enough it needed to be completely remade was a bit of a stretch, although for a movie perspective, it was quite interesting.
I did that as a kid, we had a bonfire and the morning after I went and picked up a metal rod from the ash's. The size of the blisters was insane.
how are you still alive to adulthood
The feather was a ritual along with using bones, which did actually help by making a rudementary steel but was believed to take the animals spirit and strengthen the iron with it or so I’ve heard
A wise young man once said in a loud voice "LESS YACK YACK, MORE WACK WACK!" Yes, please.
He's really watching movies, laughing and saying: "Amateurs!" XD
Thinking that the burning feather may be a reference to a ritual practiced in early Scandinavia, or so I've heard it's internet hearsay as far as I know but it sounds cool.
Basically back in the day the thought was to burn animal bones in the forge to enchant the iron weapons, but what actually happened was they made a version of steel with this technique
"Narsil was a longsword wielded by King Elendil during the War of the Last Alliance, and used by his son, Isildur, to cut the One Ring from Sauron's hand during the final battle of that war. It was later reforged into Andúril, and would become the sword of Aragorn II Elessar." -The one wiki to rule them all. Narsil was reforged by the elves. Probably explains why its quite a magical process.