Blade-smithing skills and comparing blade quality (across all cultures and periods)

[mross]

Originally Posted by kai

Hello Michael,


Polishing the blade (or at least a window) should usually suffice to get a glimpse of the microstructure of the steel.

Polishing will also yield an impression of the hardness of the edge and blade in general; tough to quantify/compare between different people though!

Regards,
Kai

Somewhat, but the observed cross section granularity has to do with the proper heat treat for the specific steel. The blade can be hard but if the grains are wrong it will snap instead of flex. The flip side is it can still show hard in a polish but bend. I'm looking at this from a metallurgical point of view.