Hello Everyone, new to the board
 

I am very interested in dark age european weaponry, and, prefer the approach you guys seem to be taking in studying it alongside the extant ethnographic blades of the world, which of course are a living tradition in some places. In other countries where the manufacture of such is endangered any patronage by supporting the crafts man by a healthy collectors demand for the object must only keep the craft traditions of authentic manufacture alive.

As a European historical enthusiast, I can only state that the study and appreciation of authentic hand smithed blades from wherever in the world is far superior than purchasing or making homogenous modern steel stock removed swords of a viking/saxon pattern.In short you will learn a great deal more about the original sword via this route.

I am a smith doing pattern welded herringbone and blodida cored blades and wanted to pick the brains of the members here regarding patterns for the smaller items like seaxs and spearheads. Does anyone know of good corroded examples in their local museums (which show the pattern) or examples that have been x rayed ? In England local museums just dont do this, whereas in Germany, for example it is done frequently.

any help would be very greatly appreciated.seasons greetings to you all regards paul.

Welcome to the Forum!
I am of no use for your questions, but if you are also in something "Islamic" or "Asian", there are plenty of people to help.
Lee Jones and Jim McDougall know awful lot about old European weapons: contact them.
And, of course...
HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Hello Paul welcome to the forums i realy hope people can help you with this interesting subject.Haveing seen an example of your work i can testify it is of the finest quality and i know you would greatly apreciate ANY help no matter how small in your persuit of knowledge in your craft.

Thanks Matey, I look forward to it, dont ask dont get as they say. Actually, all this asiatic/Indian stuff has brought to the fore a forgotton childhood interest of mine.

Anyone seen "The man who would be king " by Bro Rudyard Kipling ? the 1975 film with Sean Connery and Michael Caine in ???? Plenty of weird curved/straight ethnic bladed weapons in that, what a brilliant strory that is, its normally on here in England over the festive season along with Zulu, another classic.

Thankyou for the warm welcome extended by yourself and Mr Ariel, and have a good one ! regards paul

Let me add my welcome. You will find a good group of people here and the depth of their knowledge never fails to keep me in awe

Hello Pbinns,
I'd like to welcome you here also! Its great to hear that you are working on these blades and taking a serious historic approach to your work. Here we very much enjoy discussions that include a wide range of weapons that often exceed the specific ethnographic denominator, and recognize the important relationships that often reflect the influences that have developed between them.
The movies you mention are both excellent films and always enjoy rewatching them. As you note, there are quite a number of fascinating weapons shown in them.
There is an outstanding knowledge base among the many members of the forum here, among which there is a great degree of specialization. I always look forward to the discussions here where we can all share knowledge and data and learn together, so please dont hesitate to bring in any specific questions we might help with.
All the best,
Jim

Thanks Jim,

I appreciate your kind words of support. Actually, doing this pattern welding is addictive.!!

I would be most grateful if you could share with me knowledge of the ferrous materials used at this time and in these weapons. I know the contrast of the core laminates is dependant on trace elements. Low/ high carbon is not good enough and I am really wanting to use some high phosphorous iron together with the regular charcoal iron I can get from a specialist firm here in England. Do you know of any sources ? At the moment I am using L6 as a core contrast with the iron as did the very skilled smith who made the sutton hoo sword for the BM in the mid eighties.

Also your thoughts on the steels and techniques used to make the later Ingelrii type swords would be greatly appreciated, I am thinking of chiseling in the inscription then hammer welding in the small PW twisted rods into the billet, then repeating for the reverse patterns. The fuller is then forged in after. Again, the problem I am thinking is in the actual blade material. Would it be better to make a wrought iron and steel sandwich , or keep with an all steel blade, strongly etched to try to get some grain out of it ?

all the best, and thanks in advance regards paul.

Hi Pbinns,
While I am presently away from resources I would be glad to look into these things shortly. In the meantime I would confess that my knowledge of the metallurgy of these swords is very limited and I would defer on that topic to Lee Jones, who has done considerable work on such study of these swords and written some outstanding material. There are also a number of extremely qualified members who often address metallurgical topics whom I hope will respond.Possibly using search on this site will reveal answers to many of your questions, and hopefully further discussion here will help us all learn more on this fascinating topic. I hope you will keep us posted on progress OK? :)
All the best,
Jim

Definitely steel blade, but don't etch it - I bet the originals were polished and the inlay shows up via the different polishing effects on the two or three steels/iron involved. But you can't buff it on a motorized wheel, got to be hand polished.
Are you familiar with Jaap Ypey's articles, he x-rayed many blades during conservation, did very nice drawings of the pattern welding. Also did some metallographic analysis, found on one blade a difference in carbon, but not phosphorus if I recall.
Welcome, and may all your welds weld well ;)

http://www.home.earthlink.net/~jlp3/images/L06-06sw.jpg

"PRINGELRII" !!!!!!

Hats off to you sir ! (exposing a very bald head in the process)

Thanks for your input Geoff, much appreciated, I will now with some confidence not before held, do one with a steel blade. I am getting the hang with the welding, but certain things are letting me down, the blade polishing by hand being one of them. Would you be prepared to tell me how to do this art ? it opens the surface steel grain if I surmise correctly ?you could talk to me privately if you wanted.

I love the herringbone silver/copper hilt overlay you do ,again any info on this would be greatly appreciated, that sword looks excellent !! you are a craftsman that much is certain.
all the best paul.

Thanks, Paul, and I completely agree with you that we can learn much about how blades were made long ago by looking at pre-industrial crafts that survive to this day.
I think the important part of hand-finishing is that it does not smear the surface, you can have relatively open or closed grain depending on the way you go about it. If I can organize my thoughts on the subject, I'll send you a pm. ;)
I just ran across a doctoral thesis that looked at the metal in a Merovingian blade (as well as a katana, keris, wootz bar and a couple sabres :eek: ) -
Here's the part that ties into this thread -

7.3.1 Bajuwarian Spatha
The fragment of a Bajuwarian spatha stems from the collection of the Landesamt fur Denkmalpege (Munich). The sword was found with others at an ancient burial site close to Aschheim north east of Munich and is dated from the archaeological context to the 6th Century AD, i.e., to the Merowingian period. A part of the fragment was cleaned by the author to get down to the bare metal and then etched for 10 minutes in concentrated sulphuric acid (Figure 7.3). The etching pattern indicated that the sword is built in a sandwich structure, with four bars on each side of a bridge, which is connecting the edges in the centre of the sword. The four bars on each side of the bridge are twisted pair-wise on a length of several centimetres (compare Sachse (1994, p.24)).


Despite the patterned surface, which would indicate two phases, the CEMS spectrum of this piece (Figure 7.9) shows only _-iron with a magnetic field of 33:0T and a gaussian broadening in the outer line of 0:02mm=s. The broadening is about three times smaller than the usual broadenings obtained in backscattering, which is mainly due to the absence of saturation effects in the CEMS method. However it still indicates that this is very pure iron that is practically free of carbon.
In electron micrographs one could clearly see ferritic areas with grain boundaries only and areas with very small inclusions of less than a micrometer linear size. Electron microprobe analysis showed the inclusions to contain reasonable amounts of phosphorus, probably in the form of Fe4P. The amount of these phosphorus containing inclusions is, however, by far too small to be detected in the Mossbauer spectrum. In the electron microscope the inclusions made up about 1/25 of the area of those regions, which showed such inclusions at all. Micro-hardness was measured at about 118(9) for large ferrite grains, 150(6) for ferrite with grain boundaries and 152(8) for ferrite with inclusions containing phosphorus. The overall hardness of the sword would therefore mainly be determined by the size of the ferrite grains, which is also infuenced by the presence of the inclusions. The visibility of the pattern on the surface corresponds to different etching behaviour of the inclusion-free and inclusion-containing areas. Probably steels with different phosphorous concentrations were welded together to obtain the pattern.

From
"Non-Destructive Mossbauer Spectroscopy in Archaeometallurgy"
by Andreas Kyek, a google search should find it as a pdf file...

Thanks for that research Geoff, much appreciated, it reveals a lot to me .

...... so metallurgical technospeak aside.. that tells me that the core of this weapon was quite pure low carb iron and that the PW contrast was due to phosphourous containing iron welded (piled) with a purer iron without any phosphorous inclusions in it.

so far so good... I wonder what would happen if you bent said blade over your knee ? So much pure iron in it would surely dictate a set (ie remained bent) blade after say 5 inches out of true over the 30 inches of the blades length ??. Being hammered so thin at the tip for a good cut would mean a susceptability to incur this type of deformation in use. Easiest way to stop this is to make a thicker non flexable blade ?? any comments ?

Yes, but I wonder if they missed a higher-carbon edge material, there's another 6th C. Merovingian blade in the first chapter of "A History of Metallography" by Smith that has phosphoric iron in the patterned area, but martensitic steel at the edge.

They seemed to like thin, flexible blades - and probably both knew how to cut with them to avoid unnecessary bending, and didn't mind a little bending - compared to breaking, at least. I'm pretty sure there was a wide variety of metal content, too - have you seen this article?

http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom...eich-0508.html

It says, about some Merovingian swords:
"...The four other swords sampled were of Iron Age date and revealed similar heterogeneity and complexity (1922.07.0026, 1924.02.0309, 0310, and 0311). The one sword with a low carbon content (i.e., 0.2%) was ferrite with varying amounts of pearlite (1922.07.0026). Two of the three swords (1924.02.0310 and 0311) with higher carbon contents (i.e., 0.5%) displayed a banded, ferrite/pearlite structure indicative of piling and air cooling after having been raised to temperatures in excess of 900ºC. These two artifacts had an average hardness of 257.8 Hv. One of these swords also possessed a high phosphorus content (1924.02.0311). The remaining high-carbon sword (1924.02.0309) was a clearly superior weapon, with a martensitic grain structure indicative of quenching and a hardness of 711 Hv (Figure 5). It showed no evidence of piling."

So maybe things were similar today and 1500 years ago, lotsa crap and a few really nice blades mixed in. I haven't gone back-checking to see if there is a time factor in the above analysis, 'iron age' can be a pretty big spread, so if the lower carbon stuff was earlier than the higher carbon we could surmise some technological advance.
:cool:

Thanks Jeff, that article was very informative. the phosphoric iron was good enough for low quality axes knives etc but was selected out (or included in when banded and piled with good iron for PW cores) for the higher quality stuff that was heat treated. It points to the diversity of smiths skills and the economic considerations both when in use and when depositing grave goods as possibilities for these various quality differences.

My appreciations for sharing this research with me, although England is full of museums (some would say it IS one big museum ... and will shortly being appointing a Head Curator rather than a prime minister) information like this needs to be sought out carefully from the ivory towers of academia. A bloke smelling of quenching oil and with burn holes in his shirt is not guaranteed an audience in the British Museum!!!.Besides, Im lazy when needing to look things up.

I agree totally with your comments re flexability of blades. Before chrome vanadium heterogenous blast furnace space age steel people did not expect a blade to be bent like a car ariel. If the sword is used edge on and not slapped flat on the sword should not be subject to too much bend stress.

Like you say the only failure that really matters is a sword snapping, which these should not do. Besides in this period a lot of the real fighting was done with spears, swords would come out when the sheild wall broke and the pursuit began, I would think.


Thankyou once again for your assistance matey.. if you are ever in England you must visit. please keep in touch regards paul