Solo [Sultros Blades] Short Sword

[Eanos]

65 Fall, 513 AV At the start of the season Eanos had made a sword for Aoren and that sword was very much in his mind intended as a signature piece, one which for him reflected the very best in sword design and construction. As a weapon he considered that it had no equal in the city, but there was a flaw with the weapon, though it was not the weapon which had the flaw but the swordsmen of the city, and there lay the problem for the simple fact was that they as a whole were not trained with that type of sword and while it was fine enough to be smug about what he could do and the superiority of the swords of Sultros, if no one ever bought them, then there was little point to the exercise. If he became known for making weapons that no one bought then he would develop no reputation and certainly those who wished weapons would stay away and go instead to buy swords from the Ironworks where Eanos considered only Ros to have the skill to make a good sword and considering how busy he must be in running two large and important businesses, Eanos had grave doubts that many would convince him to make a sword for them. If he could get people to buy from him, then he could establish a reputation and then perhaps he could start to convince people about swords. He was realistic about how unlikely the latter was when it came to good swordsmen and so he somewhat reluctantly decided to change his plans, or rather at least to modify them somewhat. What he needed was a degree of experimentation and to have a sword which he could display in the shop which would be clearly superior to anything else in the city and yet familiar enough for people to wish to buy. With the decision made it was time to draft out the design for the new sword, but based on the techniques that he had used for the sword made for Aoren. With a more traditional design for this city he would also change the hilt to match, but using more advanced techniques than he normally used to decorate it. Having seen the work that Hadyn had done on that sword reminded him that there was more for him to learn on that side of things. The blade would be straight and two sided, narrowing down towards the point in order to bring the point of balance back towards the hilt. The tip would be rounded rather than pointed and there would be a fuller down the centre of the blade. The blade would be balanced so that it could be used either way round of course, and would need a heavy hilt in order to balance out the steel heavy blade. Construction would be the same as before with a softer steel core to help absorb shocks with a welded on harder steel skin which would be pattern welded and also selectively hardened to provide a balance between sharpness and being brittle.

[Eanos]

Eanos had been careful to ensure that his forge now contained all of the materials that he needed for making swords in this way so his check of the stores was merely confirmatory, though he made some notes about things which he would need to order from the Knights soon.

Once more he cleared the forge of its customary load of coal and coke, and loaded it instead with squares of pine charcoal, filling it around the shielded anvil which sat in the right hand corner of the forge. That anvil was small for sword work and heavy smelting but then much of the reason for the heavy hammer work was down to the metals cooling and that would be less of an issue here. He would in any case find out if this was a good arrangement for this sort of work or not. He lit the forge and watched it carefully, working the bellows as needed until he was sure that the fire had taken and would continue to burn.

He then turned his attention to the steel in the stores and selected carefully for the two types that he would need for the core and shell of the sword, and in each case he chose a mix of new and reused steel. The core of the sword would be a relatively low carbon steel whilst the outer shell was much higher and would have its carbon content modified in due course. He once more made mental notes that during the Winter, once this sword was forged, he would need to approach Ros and start experimenting with what might be found in the mines and how it could be smelted.

With his steel selected he started with the high carbon and placed the first section in the forge to heat, working the bellows lightly to bring the forge up to heat. By the forge he also set a bucket of water and used it to splash water on the anvil for this process of heating the metal on the charcoal would mean that dirt and soot would cling to it and unless the slag were removed then it would contaminate the metal. Much of it would come off with the forging as it would be more brittle than the metal and here the water would help to wash it.

The metal glowed redly now and he lifted it off the bed of charcoal with his fingers and laid it on the anvil. He dipped his heavy hammer in the water and the struck into the mass of steam which had erupted around the red hot metal. The forge shook a little under the impact and he realised that he would need to build himself a new forge, one which was designed especially for this purpose. This would also enable him to use a larger anvil and to set the heights to a better level than the current setup allowed.

He worked quickly, moving the steel in and out of the heat, his mind partly on wondering how he could shield the anvil in a different way whilst he reshaped the steel bar into a new and square shape. When it was done he welded a rod onto the end to act as a convenient handle in order to avoid hammering on his own fingers as he worked and set it aside. The scrap steel was then added to the forge and heated, pushing this slightly beyond red and then working it down into a single roughly welded mass. When he had it into one mass then he allowed it to cool a little and broke the mass up into smaller pieces which would help to create a more uniform blend of the older pieces of steel.

[Eanos]

The broken pieces of steel were put back into the heat and when hot enough welded back together and then shaped to form a similar sized square to the one of new steel. The two pieces of steel were placed together ready to weld together, but now he needed to start paying attention to the carbon content as the welding and folding process which followed would require a good amount of time in the heat and that would mean some of the carbon in the steel being burnt out of it. The solution was to coat the steel in a clay slurry which would slow down the heating of the outside, protecting the metal from the flame and also a coating of burnt straw to add back in carbon to the outer layers. Once the steel was up to heat the clay would burn and crack off, adding somewhat to the slag problem but once more the water helped to clean it off as the red hot steel converted it to steam and blasted off the loosely attached surface contaminants.

Now he had to switch back to his main anvil and revert to normal techniques for this required his heaviest hammer to ensure that the layers welded together. The first heating joined the metals well enough that he could start to weld properly and so with more straw ashes added he laid it back on the charcoal and took the heat up past yellow so that now the edges edged into white and small sparks of steel flashed up as the heat of the forge started to burn the metal, leaching out the carbon. He took it off quickly and hammered hard, spreading the metal out into a longer shape, each hit of the hammer driving out any gaps in the steel, including even any that were left from the initial shaping of the two different layers of new and old steel.

This was the most crude form of smithing, the metal was at its hottest and the hammer he used was the heaviest. It was crude and brute force at its most extreme and sparks flew as the hammer dented its way into the metal being forged, pushing that metal aside. Control was also at its most basic for he moved the steel with his left hand whilst his right which held the hammer simply hit down as hard as he could whilst aiming for the centre of the anvil.

From the very start, the processes would repeat time and time again, each time the metal being worked on becoming more refined and then he would repeat the process again with the core steel. This was the time when his decisions as to how he proceeded would create the patterns in the steel and as with the sword before he did not want overly complex patterns, what he wanted was a simple pattern that evoked the feeling of waves on the sea which he felt gave more strength to the blade than more random patterns.

[Eanos]

The work was much the same as he’d done before on the other sword now for he needed to create the layers which would give the steel its special properties. In order to achieve the straight grain that he wanted he would not twist the steel more than it would happen as part of the forging, instead, as before he would simply hammer it out as he welded the layers together then cut mostly through and fold back. The direction of the hammering out was changed each time to ensure that all of the edges were in turn folded in so no parts remained which were not processed.

Each time it doubled the number of layers and ensured that the weld was better, but there was a limit for too many layers would have the result of simply blending the steels into one alloy, which was not the same at all.

Every fold he used the clay slurry and ashes to coat the steel and every four he heated it and allowed it to cool so that the crystals in the steel could reform in their new alignments. The number of layers was not especially important to him as he worked, what was far more important was to ensure that all of the steel was in fact layered so that no unworked steel remained in the mix and this he checked every time that the steel bar was cut and folded to expose the layers that had been created.

When he was happy with the high carbon steel he annealed it and set it aside to cool so that once more the crystals could reset themselves ready for the next stage of forging. The process was repeated with the low carbon steel, though here the layers were less important still, but were useful to ensure that the steel had the correct mixture and did not contain unworked steel which would have different responses to shock to the rest of the core.


With both sets of steel available he now reviewed his decisions regarding it and once more confirmed in his mind that the core and shell was the route he wanted to use. It was possible to use three different types of steel so that in addition to the harder blade edges and the soft core there was another steel used as the shell for the spine of the blade but he saw no particular purpose to that given the hardening techniques he used and it added a potential weakness if the welds between the steel were not done well enough. At this point, thanks to Ros and the Knights, there was no special shortage of high carbon steel so no reason to compromise on it.

This sword would differ from the previous one in that there would be two edges and that meant that the way that the steel was welded together would change but these were mere details to any smith and he had the necessary skills to not be overly concerned by it.

[Eanos]

This was the point where the sword began to take shape as a sword and so it was here that the techniques also changed. The high carbon bar was placed in the forge and brought up to temperature for forging. The last sword with only one edge had a simple U shape that allowed during the welding of the bars for the edge steel to overlap the core to create a high carbon spine and thus to complete the shell. With this sword it needed equal amounts of high carbon steel on the sides, an overlap would not suffice. Many smiths in this situation would create the edges as bars and then weld them on which was an effective solution but one that carried some degree of risk that the bars would not weld effectively.

As a result he changed the shape of the U so that the sides of the U were the edges of the blades. This carried a risk that the joint would be less well welded with a potential for failure, but the same risk was present with the other sword too and in both cases the potential point of failure was somewhere that was not critical to the performance of the blade in battle.

For this shaping he worked on the small anvil in the forge, using both his hand and the hammer for it, making sure that most of the metal sat on the sides but enough remained in the bottom of the U to create the point of the sword which also needed to be hardened. To ensure that the metal was distributed along the sides evenly it was important to ensure that the work was neat and balanced. Just as important was to create the inside shape such that the core insert fitted closely to avoid the risk of air gaps which might not be eliminated during the forging and which would create a gap in the welding and hence in the strength of the sword.

Eventually he was happy with the shape an set the steel aside on the edge of the charcoal where it would remain hot but without burning and quickly heated and reprofiled the end of the core steel to sit neatly into the pocket he had created in the shell steel. With the two pieces of metal test fitted he added flux into the joint and pushed the two together and started the welding process.

His main point of concentration was to lengthen the bars out to the length of the sword whilst also welding them together. Each strike of his heavy hammer shot sparks out over his main anvil and pushed the metal outward. Turning the bar around he chased the steel with his hammer so that it moved in the right directions. The most important direction was to lengthen but also important was to spread the shell steel out into the middle to cover the gap and to seal in the core steel. But that was a secondary stage and if too much metal was moved inward too early then he could not judge how deep that layer of shell steel was and so risked having uneven coverage along the blade edges. The work was slow, heavy and very carefully done for all that it was still relatively crude forging work. Slowly it progressed and the bar lengthened out becoming narrower as it did and the core steel still remained in the middle while the heavy blows forged the two layers of steel together squeezing out any air and welding the levels together.

[Taylani]

XP Award!

Eanos:

XP Award:

• +2 planning
• +4 blacksmithing

Lore:

• Weapon Smith: Reputation is important
• Metal Smithing: The importance of choosing the right steel.
• Blacksmithing: Keeping a good eye on the carbon content
• The technique of folding metal.

Notes:

Comments :

as always feel free to PM me any concerns about your grade. Don’t forget to edit/delete your grade request..

TAYLANI