C’mon mete, you didn’t think I would let you have all the fun on this one did you?
I should start with,
because I have grown so tired of trying to slay this mythical beast that I know I must appear to not have a smile on my face.
I would also like to say that I have had this conversation far too many times for any of my comments to be directed at any one person.
All modern steel is forged! Both the stuff that is ground and the stuff us smiths abuse. So this is a moot point. Steel as-cast in the ingot would be fairly unusable without the benefits gained from heavy deformation breaking up dendritic structures, inclusions and clustered constituents as well closing up pipe and other voids. That is the reason mills do the hot rolling. But
they do it, so it has already been done well beyond our capacity with a cross peen, and a few heats, to improve upon.
The largest rollers ever made by man only elongates and deforms steel, to achieve this end. I, as well as all the laws of physics, can guarantee there is no “packing” going on. I too really wish the term “edge packing” could be erased from our vocabulary; it makes us look like a bunch of uneducated fools whenever it is used. By the eight grade most folks have learned that unless you are shooting for a titanic, radioactive mushroom cloud, or have a black hole in your shop, you
cannot pack atoms tighter than they want to be. These are non-negotiable laws that cannot be changed no matter how famous a name spouts the opposite. I would argue this one with Jesus himself, if he didn’t have some serious help from his old man. And that is the guy I now refer folks to when they want to argue “edge packing”. I simply tell them to take it up with God, I didn’t design the universe, he did.
When I first started attending smithing gatherings years ago, I would occasionally encounter packing being alluded to, but we have come a long way in a fairly short time and even the old proponents of it shy away from looking too foolish with it. And yet it persists, I don’t know where it keeps sprouting from.
Now there are mechanisms by which recrystalization can be accelerated by grain boundary strain induced via plastic deformation, and I am always happy to debate the effectiveness of this versus proper heat treating procedures, but I am not going to bother with the validity of squeezing iron atoms with a hammer.
Aside from being metallurgicaly invalid (for the most part) this notion of the forged blade being superior is fairly arrogant of us bladesmiths. I am quite surprised a stock remover hasn’t slipped one of his products between the ribs of a condescending smith spouting the superiority of his method. It speaks well of the patience and good nature of our grinding brothers. I feel safe in saying that most of the forged blades that out-cut the ground ones did so because the user wanted them to and needed to believe they would.
