Stupid Katana Question

[falnovice]

This may be silly, but I was curious how the much exalted traditional Japanese katana steel(many folded blade) compares to modern steel.

Also, I saw something a while ago about how the master swordsmiths would fold the metal hundreds of times to produce thousands of layers.....I thnk the historian was Dave King maybe???
I don't understand that one....fold it 31 times and you have a billion layers. Whats up with the hundreds of folds...hell, whats up with the hype?

 

[TexasNativeDRJH]

I'm no sword expert, but my college instructor is also a knifemaker and he told me that the Japanese mainly folded their steel because they had to make the best out of what they had at the time. Apparently they lacked the natural resources to produce high quality steel, so they adapted their forging method to suit their needs. Folding the steel was supposed to make the grain patterns more uniform, instead of having strong and weak spots.

I think that modern steels like spring steel are better suited for modern swords than the folding method, but I could be wrong.

 

[Mongo-man]

they used the folding process and the heating process to purify the iron ore called Tamahagane. They also threw in scrap metal lying around.
By pounding the steel the impurities came to the surface.

see this article

http://www.scnf.org/forge.html


modern steel, especially the vacuum made particle steel, are an enormous step ahead of traditional made steel like tamahagane

 

[Triton]

This may be silly, but I was curious how the much exalted traditional Japanese katana steel(many folded blade) compares to modern steel.

Think that one has already been answered above. Today folding is done for a traditional appearance... in essence for traditional and aesthetic reasons only, not for performance reasons.

Also, I saw something a while ago about how the master swordsmiths would fold the metal hundreds of times to produce thousands of layers.....I thnk the historian was Dave King maybe???
I don't understand that one....fold it 31 times and you have a billion layers. Whats up with the hundreds of folds...hell, whats up with the hype?

It's just that hype. Folding steel hundreds of times would basically create homogenous steel, most traditionally made swords are folded far fewer times.

 

[falnovice]

Thanks for the responses guys.
What would be the best modern steel for a Katana? 1060 seems to be popular.

 

[Triton]

Thanks for the responses guys.
What would be the best modern steel for a Katana? 1060 seems to be popular.

In my opinion the best steel is going to be the one that the smith is most comfortable working with. I doubt most users would be able to tell a dimes worth of difference when using any decent carbon steel.

 

[Rich S]

Typically, traditional Japanese swords were folded 8 -15 times. The number
of layers is approximately 2 to the "n"th power, where n is the number of
folds. You can do the math.

Rich S