Consider this a hate thread, but why the frick do people have such a hard-on for japanese swords and the associated tamahagane / tatara process?
It's literally bloomery steel.
>but its folded
yeah, no shit. all bloomery steel consolidated. Has been that way since man first reduced iron oxide in a bloomery furnace into shitty porous blooms
>but 1000 folds means 1000x stronger
each lamination introduces weaknesses. inclusions get trapped, forge scale get squashed between your holy layers
>but tradition
don't care. Do you know what "tradition" looks like in the rest of the world? Progress. The west had a tradition of improving their materials technology and getting a better product as a result
>but pretty patterns
hada and hamon are boring. Wake me up when the wootzposters return.
Also, swordthread i guess.
Each folding adds flux to remove slag. If done properly. Expensive but the end result is as good as you can get to homogeneous steel without melting steel at 1500ºC. Generally they used different grades of steel and they got a decent quenching on par with the best in Europe.
>each lamination introduces weaknesses
Each folding decarburizes the steel that starts with excess carbon, if you're introducing weakness then the problem is you. All non-crucible swords pre-1750 were folded.
>All non-crucible swords pre-1750 were folded.
yeah, I am aware.
Also, please note the literal shinshinto era nihonto in the OP pic. It is not homogenous, not even close.
The ironic part of nippon steel is that they kinda stopped their development after Sengoku. Their autism was redirected to the guard because the status...
Rapiers were better but muh guns so they're forgotten.
Baby knife hole is on the wrong side.
Best swords, stay mad eurocuck hemagay
Too long, didn't read.
Gonna buy a katana in honor of you.
That's why I'm buying a katana in a modern steel, with a proper heat treat.
What now tard?
uh... good for you? like, congrats. You understood the issue and fixed it
Fite me irl
>>but 1000 folds means 1000x stronger
That's largely it. Normies don't understand that folding was the standard process for working any sort of steel back then, but the very high number of layers impresses them. Big numbers are impressive to the caveman brain.
>forge scale get squashed between your holy layers
not quite, the process of folding was to get rid of impurities, but that's besides the point.
>hada and hamon are boring.
To you perhaps, to most people they look pretty cool.
What's the purpose of that? Katanas are interesting because their artistic and historic value. A modern one, eve though it might kick the shit out of an antique in combat, isn't as interesting because it has no history and wasn't made my anyone important. It's like comparing a vintage car with a modern Honda Civic. The Civic is going to eat the old car's lunch when it comes to mileage, performance, comfort...but nobody is going to pay millions for the civic at auction because it gives them a megaboner.
>why buy something affordable and functional when you could buy something expensive and non functional, because muh soul
Literal snowflake mentality
>not quite, the process of folding was to get rid of impurities, but that's besides the point.
Yeah, to evenly distribute non metallic inclusions and break them up into smaller granules. But the layer lines / laminations / forge welds still create weaknesses, even though they're not inclusions. They're very visible under a microscope, for example.
>What's the purpose of that?
Traditionally made katanas are bad for martial arts because of the added cost and lower performance. So if you are a kenjutsu practitioner you will want a modern monosteel spring tempered sword. The traditionally made ones are best as art pieces and light duty cutting.
>Consider this a hate thread, but why the frick do people have such a hard-on for japanese swords and the associated tamahagane / tatara process?
"sell the sizzle, not the steak"
people enjoy the samurai cultural narrative, and why blame them? it's badass. it's not about the shape or nature of the sword but instead the mythical position it occupies in stories
>Noooo you can't just enjoy the concept of a great master creating a masterwork, and an item with a soul, that's not optimal!
if you're gonna make a masterwork, i want to see big, thicc, fat spheres of cementite, and i want them distributed in curvy rafts.
The folding isn't even the issue, it's the differential hardening and no tempering.
Katana made from magnacut
Fixd
>why the frick do people have such a hard-on for japanese swords and the associated tamahagane / tatara process?
anime, movies, pop culture and because it looks and sounds cool so it must mean that katana is the best sword in the world
Its well known that japanese steel was unusually weak due to poor iron ore resources on the archipelago, in contrast western and chinese and korean peninsula iron ore was among the strongest and tailor made for weaponry
There are many accounts of western sword literally breaking japanese katanas on initial contact and japanese katanas breaking when hitting western swords even if the sword was not being wielded
I just want an affordable sword of good quality so i can solidusmax when if get a p90
The cheapest Japanese style swords you can get that aren't made of explodium are like 200 bucks. They won't be pretty though, and the handle wrap is guaranteed to come apart at some point.
Reasonably nice stuff starts at ~500 -1000.
Hanwei tactical katana
Anime, mostly. The Japanese fricking Loved their swords just like the Brits, French, and Germans loved their swords and they're WAY closer to their medieval age than we Westerners are. I mean, if you ever want to see what happens when the asia equivalent of Scotsmen have to do 250 years of industrial development in 50 years and then get the Sun dropped on them twice, just look at Japan. I'm a MASSIVE weaboo and I Know Japan is fricking weird. Where was I?
Ah, right. Katana. So in 1868 the Boshin war kicked off. A big revolutionary conflict that dragged Japan kicking and screaming into the modern age. Thing was, Japan wasn't doing much technological development until then so a lot of the fighting was done with hand-me-down Katanas. It lines up with the US perception of black powder revolvers, old fashioned but there's this Aesthetic to them, a sense of History and Heritage. This doesn't mean much to the average Salaryman but it comes through in Japanese entertainment.
And this is where Anime comes in. Japanese culture tends to breed perfectionism and they never got the memo that Cartoons were for kids. It turns out that you can do action scenes in animation for the fraction of the price of live action scenes. Animators would ask what was cool and come up with "Swords. Swords are cool" So they made anime about Japanese swords and these became widely successful.
tl;dr Japan is weird. Japan made anime about swords. People ended up picking up on Japanese love of swords.
Consider this. No Yuro knight has ever successfully invaded Japan because they fear the Japanese katana. A katana can bisect a knight in two before she can even say muh. This was also the reason Yankees used the warcrime nukular bomb against Japan. Truly a katana to be feared.