Steel heated to its critical temperatures in a bed of coals red hot burning with carbon combustion from air forced in by a blower or bellows, then rapidly cooled to trap carbon atoms in the steel, making a harder alloy than iron alone, which is a relatively soft metal. Today, 980 MPa steel alloys utilized by automakers for higher strength metal parts in cars, trucks & SUV's or automobiles, while similar steel superalloys are utilized to make the best knife blades.
Throughout history, swords have held a mystical alure, in part because of the required concentration, effort & focus intensity, & energy the sword maker puts into making the sword. In Japan a hand-crafted samurai sword can take over a month to make & costs thousands of dollars, or many hundreds of thousands of yen.
Blacksmiths that forge swords and knives have been celebrated and honored throughout history as the swords & knives they produced made the difference in who won the wars. A well-made sword in the hands of a well-trained soldier becomes a deadly killing weapon that no new gun laws can stop. People hurt people, not guns or knives & that is just true. All of these public mass murder events are the result of social decay of the family structure, attacks from those with satanic hard left extreme ideology who hate Christianity & sought to redefine marriage & family to their secular worldly definition. Words cutting deeper than the sharpest blade or sword edges, the SJW rhetoric causing more harm than good.
According to the bible, the mouth has the ability to bless or curse other people, a choice that you should choose wisely by choosing life by blessing other people, edifying them with kind uplifting and encouraging words. Teach people to use their cutting blades to make food in the kichen, to fix or repair things or to cut wildlife free from nets & webs & plastic junk they get intentionally trapped in because of inconsiderate plastic polluters who treat the earth like a dumping ground, which is especially unwise & foolish since most common plastics can be feasibly & easily recycled, including turning back into oil or synthetic crude, which can further be converted into hundreds of millions of other higher value products.
A blacksmith can teach an apprentice how to forge a sword out of steel in a few weeks of daily instruction & practice. Learning to sharpen the sword by griding it to a razor-sharp edge, that can take a lifetime of practice. Sharpening blades manually requires a refined and honed skill that leverages the blade smiths listening to the sounds of the blade interacting with the grindstone, whetstone or sharpening system, that blade makers feel as pressure and the angle that the blade is held in relation to the sharpening media, which all influence the final blade profile, blade angle, blade sharpness, edge holding retention and many other blade attributes. If the blade edge overheated, it becomes softer & less hard and thus dulls faster when used. Blade smiths cold grind blades to reduce heating of the edge bevel or intersection between the two cut planes that form the V shape pointed cutting edge and blade tip. Its better to have tough softer steel in the body & back of the blade, while a hard RC 60 or similar hardness blade edge holds it sharpness better.
Japanese sword makers believe that part of their soul energy imbedded in each of the swords that they painstakingly hand make from raw ingredients, energy, skill, intelligence, focus, effort and time. These swords are purchased as wall ornaments today as nearly everyone uses guns for self-defense and in armed military conflicts now. Blades have bigger and more valuable applications in personal shaving devices, in utility knives, EDC knives and around the kitchen as kitchen knives for cutting up food, veggies, fruit, nuts, seeds, fungi and meat. Chef's treasure their knifes and pay good money to experts who sharpen them. Some Chef's even become armature blade sharpeners to maintain the cooking and food preparation knives DIY style.
Swords were treasured and highly valued throughout history before modern mass manufacturing enabled the high-volume production of D2 steel blades at very low costs. Consider Swiss army knives and the scale of the manufacturing at Victorinox in Switzerland as an example of cheap knife making today!
I EDC carry a super cheap Smith & Wesson Tactical Ops knife or a SOG Autoclip or similar locking folding utility personal protection and multi-application blade; that I regularly use as an improvised tool, nearly every day & for which I recently began studying knife sharpening and started sharpening my knives with a whetstone & then more recently a Lansky 5 Stone Sharpening System :)
Swords were often passed down from one generation of people to another. Today many antique swords can be found corroded in riverbeds. Amazingly, these swords can actually be restored in many cases, usually the leather & wood handle has to be remade, but the high strength harder steel alloy in the blade resists rusting like natural iron, which is softer & prone to rapid oxidation in outdoor weather. When water, oxygen & sun light heat & UV energy hit the natural iron, the oxygen in air readily gives up electrons to iron, which then forms rust or iron oxide easily. Water in nature helps to facility the interaction between oxygen and iron to form rust or oxides of iron.
Corrosion of iron & steel costs hundreds of billions a year, especially because corroding rebar can expand to 7X the original size of the rebar, fracturing the dried out brittle concrete around it. This is why saltwater ocean spray corrodes reinforced concrete bridges & buildings made of rebar reinforced concrete. This is also why salting roadways in winter weather as a deicer, causes cars driving in such salty water to rust out faster with corrosion that eats away the iron & steel used in the automobiles frame & suspension components. Salts chloride ions are similar to oxygen, in that they will readily donate electrons to iron, especially as a solution of NaCl in water or salt water, which forms when the salt used for deicing mixes with the melting ice, which gets unsprayed onto the underbody of the vehicles where the water, oxygen & chloride ions rapidly oxidize iron.
Swords, unlike guns, have more practical applications as a tool to cut rope, vegetation to clear a foot path, to trim, cut or profile other materials. Swords can be used to spear foods & to hunt or for self-protection or in sword fighting. Guns have much fewer applications outside of sport shooting, hunting & warfare, though sadly both knives and guns are used by criminals hurting other people with crime.
Many militias throughout history provided their fighters with swords, double edged stabbing weapons of different lengths. These blade weapons took on cultural symbolism as described by Homer, while becoming a pervasive global technology. Shaper blade edges the real technology, especially because of their ability to hold a sharp edge, what they can cut and how they are utilized. The shape of a blade reflects the application, such that different profiles & shapes influence the way the sharp edges interact with things being cut. Somebody going to get cut, Jim! Curved blades were the preferred type in Japan & the Middle East, while later blades were straight shaped and optimized to stab rather than cut, in order to get through plate armor that soldiers typically wore. Today Kevlar & ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene fiber fabrics fill this roll in bullet proof vests & cut resistant gloves.
Ceramics are some of the hardest materials to cut, usually they are chip-cut away in the kerf path of a rotating saw blade that mechanically erodes the super hard ceramic, in a dust forming process that is better done with water to reduce dust blowing around all over the place. I recently used my angle grinder with a synthetic diamond on tungsten carbide tips steel ceramic cutting blade to dry cut fire bricks & it sent sand colored dust in every direction, though I did use an empty plastic trash can to catch most of the cutting debris. I also wore safety glasses, a dust mask & hearing protection, since the Metabo MHP angle grinder so loud & the brick & ceramic cutting such a dust forming activity. Breathing ceramic, mineral, rock, wood or other dust not good for your lungs. The particles get deep into the lungs where they blog gas exchange of CO2 exiting your blood stream with O2 from their air going through the membranes into your blood, as mechanical particles that promote scar tissue formation, similar to COPD if dangerous dust continued to be inhaled for long persons of time, daily, or regularly. Wear a dusk mask, N95 or better, if you're working with dust or in dust forming processes.
The sharpest knives are actually made of advanced ceramics by Kyocera in Japan. NGK also in Japan uses high tech ceramics in spark plug manufacturing :) I have an old smartphone called a Kyocera Brigadier that has a sapphire screen touch surface window. Next to diamond, sapphire the crystalized oxides of aluminum, one of the hardest optically clear materials known. Kyocera uses different blends of doped zirconia ceramics, just like the best dental tooth replacements, which are super tough & strong, to make their exceptionally sharp though fragile to chipping ceramic knives. Typically, aluminum oxide, magnesium oxide, tin oxides & other metal oxides are blended with the zirconium oxide or zirconia, then wet slurry mixed uniformly before precision drying & then sintering in special continual production kilns, thus superheated to obtain advanced ceramics. Specialized steel alloys dominate in most other blade technologies, especially those steels enhanced with molybdenum, nickel, cobalt, and vanadium. Kyocera uses silicon nitride ceramics in metal furnaces for low pressure aluminum casting due to its non-stick high temperature resistance, unlike iron alloys, so the aluminum parts are not contaminated by iron delusion. Molten aluminum does not adhere to the ceramic walls, crucible, mold filling pipe or other parts exposed to the heated liquid aluminum or aluminum alloys. Silicon nitride also has lower mass than iron or steel, making maintenance of such kilns or casting furnaces easier, while the lower thermal conductivity of silicon nitride enhances the energy efficiency by reducing conductive heat loss.
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