Hi.
My name is Richard Furrer, and I'm a blacksmith in Door
County, Wisconsin.
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The sword we're making now is going to be 24 inches of
cutting edge, double edged, and leaf shaped.
The most common length was 18 inches.
The tools we're going to use are very similar to the Greek
period ones.
We have a large block to use as an anvil.
We have hand hammers, tongs, to manipulate the hot work.
And we have chisels to help refine the shape.
The first thing to do is to create a pattern so you can
get an image in your head out onto paper, or
in this case, wood.
You can work out proportions and get a better feel for the
overall shape so you have this supported mental image and
something to reference when you're forging the blade.
From the very start, your
selection of your raw material--
if that's incorrect, then the blade won't be any good.
If you don't do the smelting right, if you incorporate too
many impurities into it, then the sword won't work, because
you're taking dirt as a raw material, iron ore.
You would roast them, heat them up, and either dunk them
in water or let them cool, and crush them,
turn them into powder.
Then you make a large mud brick stack called a furnace.
And you would load charcoal in that, and get air through the
bellows, and dump in the iron ore, and then another layer of
charcoal, and more iron ore and more charcoal.
And over the course of a day, you would pull the impurities
out of the iron ore.
According to Aristotle, they could then alter the carbon
level of that iron bloom.
So they weren't left with whatever
came out of the furnace.
They could alter it.
They could dictate how useful that material was going to be.
Then we take it to a blacksmith's forge, a charcoal
driven forge with two bellows, just like the Greeks used.
So it provides air to the charcoal so it burns hot.
And we put the bloom fragments in there.
The bloom is hot and we need to consolidate it.
There's a lot of wasted space in there.
So we need to pull it together into a solid bar.
And we do that through repeated heating and forging
and some forge welding, meaning were joining the
individual pieces together.
And in that way they could dictate where the
cutting edge steel was.
So they could pick the best material to be right out on
the cutting edge.
And then the material that was a little bit lesser quality
could be for the body of the blade.
And from there, it gets refined by hammering.
So we force it into the shape we want it to be in.
And then we heat that entire blade up and quench it.
The quench medium can be oil or water.
There's grounds for both of them in Greek history.
We'll be using oil in ours.
So we heat the blade up to roughly 1,450 degrees
Fahrenheit, what I perceive as a dull orange.
And it's that severe temperature change when we
pull that heat out that the blade gets hard.
And depending on the chemistry, we have very little
time to cool, a matter of seconds.
It's very severe on the steel.
You can have a crack along the cutting edge in
100 different places.
And then you have to start over.
So in the quench this Spartan sword is
birthed, it is given life.
So this tool of death is born in this quench.
After the quench, we'll rub a shiny spot on the edge so we
can see the true nature of the steel.
And then we'll bring it back to the coals and slowly heat
it over the coals until we get a visible color to the steel.
That's the tempering process.
We formed a certain structure, crystalline
structure, in the steel.
And that carbon is trapped inside that.
And by re-heating to a lower extent, we allow some of that
carbon to escape back out into other structures in the steel.
And that takes the brittleness away and gives us a
functioning edge.
Following the quench and temper, you still have to
create the edge on the sword.
So it was scraped down to a clean finish.
Sometimes they used stones or steel scrapers
to refine the shape.
And then it was polished, because a
polished sword cuts better.
There's less resistance.
The thing that makes the finished blade so special is
you took the thought, the mental image of it, your
impression of what a sword is, and you've created it.
You've made it real.
It's that three dimensional finish line
of the initial thought.