hURR dURR dERP said:
odubya23 said:
First, I aim weeaboo at everyone, if they don't like it, they can report me like everyone else, and I'll take this up with the moderators, again. If you actually can read and write in Japanese, or are able to name more than three ethnicities in Japan, or be able to name the four big Islands, then I humbly apologize. If not, then you're a Japan-o-centric pervert weeaboo! Go watch more hentai.
Second, your abilty to read english is excellent, you may note, upon review, that I am responding to several posts at once in the text.
Thirdly, you seem to have a keen grasp of physics, but a poor one of sword making. If your grasp of iron working and metallurgy was a bit keener, you would know that the smith uses a carbon-adding substance called flux that ensured a uniform carbon content whilst removing impurites simultaneously. Also you would know the difference between tempering and annealing
I didn't respond to the weeaboo comment because I found it offensive, I responded because just talking about something from Japan (in this case, a sword) doesn't make one a weeaboo. And judging from your post, my suspicion that you don't know what the term
weeaboo means is confirmed. Also, I do take offense to being called a pervert when nothing I have said warrants such petty namecalling.
I'll concede the second point with the suggestion you make it clear what parts of your post are directed at what parts of your quote in the future.
The third; you're right, I'm not exactly an expert when it comes to metallurgy. I do however know with 100% certaincy that folding a blade hundreds of times is pure nonsense.
Let's look at it from a perspective I'm more familiar with: Physics. Let's say you make exactly one hundred folds in stead of the "hundreds" you refer to. This means you end up with 2100 layers, or
1.267.650.600.228.229.401.496.703.205.376 individual layers. I'm sure you can begin to see my point just from the sheer size of this number. Even if you somehow were a supernaturally skilled smith who could make layers of exactly one molecule thick, you still wouldn't be able to fit that many layers into the thickness of one katana. So no matter what benefits the layering might provide, and even if you use tricks to counter the huge loss of carbon that would otherwise build up with such a long process, there just isn't a single benefit to making "hundreds of folds".
That's good math, but I wouldn't call it physics. The layers become more compressed, making them thinner with each succesive fold, making the blade denser. Adding the flux is not a trick, it's good metalworking. Every time you fold the metal, more of the atoms in the alloy line up to make eutectic or martensitic domains. The layers become more compressed, making them thinner with each succesive fold. It's a function of force over time, the same force that transmutes a lump of soft, brittle coal into a hard, super-compressed diamond. You can't put coal in an ordinary pressure cooker and come out with diamonds, but you can hammer steel to line up magnetic domains and atomic structures.
Did the antique Japanese know they were forging on an atomic level, probably not, but they did know that the more folds you added to the sword, the tougher the blade would be. After that, they would heat-treat the blade with a mixture of clay, ash, water and other ingredients covering the blade. Any remaining eutectoid regions are then transformed into martensite, primarily along the cutting edge, leaving some eutectoid regions for flexibility.
Did every japanese smith fold every katana over a hundred times? Probably not, but the more folds there were, the higher quality, and less likely to break the katana was.
