Metallurgical and other features of Japanese swords

✍ Scribed by Benjamin Smith Lyman

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1896
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 619 KB
• Volume: 141
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0016-0032
• DOI: 10.1016/s0016-0032(96)90052-6

✦ Synopsis

Forging.--The smith carefully selected and tested his steel or iron; for, although the earliest swords were made of copper or bronze, only steel and iron have been used for many hundred years past. Preferably steel alone was used, but sometimes one-third, one:half, two-thirds, or even more iron was intimately united with the steel by welding bars together. The metal was generally Japanese, but in the last 3oo years European metal has occasionally been used, and then sometimes marked as metal of the "Southern Barbarians."

In the all-steel or "pure-make" style of forging, as distinguished from the "mixed-make," several flat pieces of steel amounting all together to something over a quarter of the weight of the sword, are placed one on another, with an iron rod welded as a handle to the lowest one, and are heated in the fire. To prevent the conversion of the steel into soft iron by "burning," or oxidising its carbon, and also to keep the surface of the metal free from iron oxide that would be injurious if hammered in, the steel is never heated without being previously covered carefully with a thin wash of refractory loam and sprinkled with straw ashes, an ingenious precaution that is unknown in Western countries Abstract of a lecture delivered before the Franklin Institute, Friday, November 8, i895.