Damascus cuts through rock, eh?

M

migo

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http://gizmodo.com/5626765/this-roc...cking-super-steel-was-forgotten-250-years-ago

If you were on a battlefield say, 700 years ago, Damascus steel mattered. The super-strong blades were fabled in their age, said to have sliced through the swords of foes and solid rock. Then we forgot how to make it.

6th century Metalworkers in India and Sri Lanka were the first to begin crafting the incredibly strong material, shocking Europeans with their weaponry that didn't lose its sharpness and seemed able to cut through anything in its path—as well as gleaming with a dazzling marbled pattern. And underneath it all, visible only now—two an a half centuries later—are amazingly complex carbon nanotubes. Then, abruptly, the weapons started to vanish around 1750. And nobody knows why. More importantly, nobody knows how—the secret behind the nanotech steel's production was lost to history, and hundreds of years of debate and research still hasn't settled the matter.

Some scientists believe the steel's disappearance is due to the loss of raw materials—perhaps Indian ore of special mineral content—that granted the blades their toughness. Other historians argue smiths simply had no idea themselves how they were creating the stuff, and instead selected from large batches those blades that demonstrated the properties of Damascus steel. Swords weren't exactly decisive factors by the time the Damascus blades began to vanish, but who knows what material breakthroughs we might have reached sooner had we not forgotten the steel's recipe?
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Hmmm......
 
i doubt it was THAT great. i mean, are their no examples in musuems modern smiths can examine? surely blades of this magnitude would of been given to kings and whatnot. 1750 wasnt that long ago.
 
That was an interesting article, and also a very interesting hypothesis on how the art was lost.
 
"cut through anything in its path", huh? I guess those guys also made tough shields and claimed could defense blows from anything. Then what happens when their swords hack their shields... :foot:
 
If you were on a battlefield say, 700 years ago, Damascus steel mattered. The super-strong blades were fabled in their age, said to have sliced through the swords of foes and solid rock.
Click to expand...

There is quite a difference between being vastly superior to the steel of the Northern European middle ages vs. being superior to modern steels. "fabled" is definitely the correct term.

add:
http://bronksknifeworks.com/historical.htm
Historical Background of Damascus blades
by
Dr. John Verhoeven, metallurgist
There is a general myth in some of the popular literature that genuine Damascus steel blades possess outstanding mechanical properties, often thought superior to modern steels. This idea was shown to be incorrect as long ago as 1924. A famous Swiss collector, Henri Moser, donated 4 genuine Damascus steel swords, one with a non typical carbon content and microstructure, to B. Zschokke, who performed extensive careful experiments including metallographic and chemical analysis in addition to mechanical testing [15]. A series of bending tests compared samples from the swords to a pattern welded blade and a cast blade from the famous German knife center in Solingen. The 3 good Damascus blades showed significantly inferior bending deflection prior to breakage than the 2 Solingen blades in spite of the fact that the Brinell hardness of the 3 ranged from only 193 to 248, compared to 347 and 463 for the pattern welded and cast Solingen blade, respectively. This is not too surprising in view of the now well known fact that toughness of high carbon steels is inherently low; the Solingen blades had carbon levels of 0.5 to 0.6% compared to 1.3 to 1.9% for the 3 Damascus blades. The reputation of Damascus steel blades being superior to European blades was probably established prior to the 17th century when European blades were still being made by forge welding of carburized iron. It is hard to avoid embrittlement of such blades due to imperfect welding during the forging process as well as difficulty with the carburizing process.
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Last edited:
A comment off the first site:
I think Damascus blades disappeared because it takes too much time to forge a blade.
You have to heat the steel under a coal forge and fold it is several different ways over and over again, while pounding it thinner and thinner.

Each one of those lines is in fact another layer of steel folded over the previous layer.
The more layers, the better the quality.
No two blades have ever the same pattern and they are impossible to reproduce.

The secret to the blade shapness is that the sharp edge will have in fact as many edges as layers progressibly thinner. so the sharp edge cross section looks like a collection of serrated super fine edges in a "V" shape.
 
00max00 said:
"cut through anything in its path", huh? I guess those guys also made tough shields and claimed could defense blows from anything. Then what happens when their swords hack their shields... :foot:
Click to expand...

It would create a rift in the space time continium. :D

Jim L.
 
Vicarious Reality said:
A comment off the first site:
I think Damascus blades disappeared because it takes too much time to forge a blade.
You have to heat the steel under a coal forge and fold it is several different ways over and over again, while pounding it thinner and thinner.

Each one of those lines is in fact another layer of steel folded over the previous layer.
The more layers, the better the quality.
No two blades have ever the same pattern and they are impossible to reproduce.

The secret to the blade shapness is that the sharp edge will have in fact as many edges as layers progressibly thinner. so the sharp edge cross section looks like a collection of serrated super fine edges in a "V" shape.
Click to expand...
The lines are created by the slow cooling of the steel and the careful forging thereafter so as not to lose the carbide segregation. These were not pattern welded like what we call damascus today, but steel currently referred to as wootz, pulad, or bulat.
 
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