[ding!]
[whoosh]
[scratching noises]
I'm Matt
I'm Kerry
We are the Stagmer brothers of Baltimore Knife and Sword.
We're gonna be building some of your favorite weapons
And some weapons that you've never seen before.
This is Man at Arms: Reforged.
By far the most requested item in 2018 has been Brisingr
from the Eragon dragonrider series.
Now, yeah, there was a movie made of this,
but we're gonna take those images of that sword and shove it to the side.
We're gonna start straight from the novels, straight from the source.
In fact, there was an entire chapter from the third book in the series
that dove in and gave a very detailed description on how this sword was made.
We're going to do our absolute best to follow exactly how that text shows that sword was made
and bring to life, for you:
Brisingr.
To begin making my steel for Brisingr, I have this nice piece of meteorite.
I did not find it under a sacred tree
while these are readily available online.
This specific example is called Campo meteorite and it comes from South America.
And before that, outer space.
It has 6.68% nickel, which is twice as high as modern high-nickel steels.
The other thing that it has, it has zero carbon in it, but it has a lot of cobalt and phosphorus.
Cobalt and phosphorus are very bad for steels, so if I were to stretch it out into a bar as-is,
it will first of all be iron, and second of all will be very bad iron, and very bad for a sword.
So my strategy is, I'm going to heat it up and crush it into very small pieces, releasing some of the phosphorus.
♫
After heating the meteor up in the forge
we now move to the power hammer to start crumbling and breaking it up.
You'll notice that the majority of the fragments get collected in a tray that we specially built for this process.
But some of them, they land on the ground.
I'm there to assist to make sure none of our precious material gets lost.
♫
This is an R3 melter. It refines my material.
What's going to happen here, is
the iron and nickel will be heated up
and the phosphorous and cobalt will start leaching out and escaping.
The iron will start picking up carbon from the charcoal that we'll be burning in here
and it will land as a meteorite-like bloom at the bottom, which will be ready for consolidation and folding.
♫
I've recovered the most usable pieces of refined meteorite
and stacked them on the paddle.
The paddle itself is a piece of meteorite forge-welded onto the holding stick.
Once all the steel pieces are prepared,
and stacked
I will apply a wet cloth, or a piece of paper
around it
and some straw ash.
The wet cloth and the straw ash have two purposes:
The first one is to prevent immediate decarborization.
Remember, primitive steels lose carbon very fast, as soon as they are heated up, as they're very porous in structure.
Once clay slurry is applied on top of the straw ash and the paper
it creates a ceramic box around the billet so it doesn't lose material as it's moving around in the fire.
The clay as it melts under high temperature, acts as flux
very similarly to the way you see us applying borax.
All in all,
this whole setup is a very smart way of going about in producing good quality steel.
♫
After stacking his selected pieces of bloom,
Ilya will take them to the Bradley to cut the stack down and begin folding on the anvil.
At this state, the meteorite steel will contain a lot of phosphorus, which is detrimental to the steel itself
and you will see that it will start, try to collapse, and shred on me, even with the lightest of the blows.
So, I will not be using meteorite for the entire sword, and I will laminate it with another material later on
which is arguably better.
However,
nickel, when you etch it, produces a very very bright surface.
Mirror-like polish.
And that is why, in the book specifically, meteorite steel is called brightsteel.
♫
Once the meteorite billet is well on its way, I lay it aside and take a pause.
And now I begin working with tamahagane.
Remember, in order to get the characteristic pattern that is described in Eragon,
I have to use both tamahagane and meteorite, together.
Tamahagane -- Japanese steel -- means "jewel steel."
It's pretty easy to understand why.
Here I have a piece of very high grade tamahagane
and you see the grains are very bright, and look like diamonds stuck together.
This is perhaps what inspired the term "brightsteel" in the books.
Just like the meteorite, tamahagane has to be worked in such a way that you're not polluting the materials with modern steels.
So, I've prepared a tackle.
The tackle is the holding stick, this much of which is made out of pre-folded tamahagane,
and, a paddle made, again, out of tamahagane is welded onto the tip.
I've already consolidated and broken some pieces of tamahagane that will be piled on top.
And
after I process, consolidate, and square out this piece, it will be the very top.
♫
So this is exactly what I was talking about earlier.
You saw in one heat, the entire ingot of tamahagane has been reduced into a square bar
without almost any major pieces breaking off
at a heat that is relatively low.
And that is possible because it has virtually no phosphorous or sulfur
meaning it is a very good steel to begin with.
♫
To consolidate our material,
we're going to have to do several folds.
Underneath the power hammer, Ilya will use a hot-cut tool to cut the billet in half
then move to the anvil, where I assist him in creating the fold.
We will repeat this process several times, until the material is ready to be drawn out into a bar.
♫
With both the meteorite and the tahamagane now consolidated,
it's time to join them as one.
♫
Ilya's going to place both pieces of material in the forge,
forge-weld them together,
he's then going to hot-cut and fold them a couple times to gain more layers,
and then it's time to draw them out into his bars,
twist them,
and those bars will become the core of the sword.
♫
With the desired layer count now achieved,
it's time to start drawing out the bars to length
then move to the vise
and twist them up.
These will become the core.
♫
With the central core now formed,
it's time to make the wrap that goes around that creates the edge of the sword blade.
♫
After creating his final billet,
Ilya now begins to forge out the blade on Brisingr.
♫
Ilya now uses a special mixture of clay as a refractory to go over the center of this blade.
You'll see him put in small lines down the sides
As he does this, it'll create a hamon the same way it would for a Japanese sword.
♫
To make both the guard and the pommel, we'll be using some leftover brightsteel.
Ilya first moves to the power hammer, using a series of tools to create his pre-form.
♫
He'll then move to the anvil
and do some hand-forging.
In the book, it just describes the guard as being a down-turned piece of metal.
Ilya's decided to go the extra mile and make the guard terminate in talons.
♫
With the base of the guard now forged,
it's time to add in our tang slot into the center of our guard.
Ilya's going to use a punch and a drift to create the desired hole.
♫
The pommel's described as having four claws holding the blue gem.
To create that, I'm going to make two slices with the angle grinder
that will divide our pommel material into four equal quadrants that Ilya can then forge out into our four claws.
With the pommel material now heated up to proper temperature,
it's time to move to the anvil, using a hot-cut tool to spread our material equally.
We then use the corner of the anvil to finish it out.
At this point, all four tines are bent out
and Ilya can move on to tapering them out into his claws.
♫
Aright, Ilya's done a really awesome job forging our guard and our claw-like pommel.
These are pretty much forged to the shape they're gonna be, just gotta do a little cleanup.
And down here on the pommel, I gotta trim this off down to here
then I'm gonna turn the square into round, and do a little bit of figurative grinding as well.
And just kinda clean this up
polish it up
and we'll be good to go.
♫
Once the guard and the pommel are cleaned up on the sanders,
we'll then be etching them to show pattern, and then baking them in a kiln to get our desired blue colors.
Alright, at this point
I'm almost done the last bit of polishing that I can do on these machines
after this,
it's gonna be all traditional polishing by Ilya, done by hand.
So I'm gonna move to a 600 grit
do my very last step
and hand it off to him.
♫
Now that the bulk of the shaping has been done on the electrical grinder
it's time for the hand-polishing.
I'm going to be doing that in two stages:
In the first stage, I'm going to use the artificial stones and the first of the nagura stones --
the chu nagura.
This will prepare the blade for etching.
Etching will bring out the true form and beauty of the meteorite contained in the blade.
♫
I've been waiting a long time for this episode.
The reason is, it combines the two traditions of Japanese and Western smithing, as well as polishing.
And this is my great opportunity to disabuse a lot of misconceptions
about both traditions.
Western sword-making involves folded steel, involves smelting.
For example, the Corsican tradition
of sword-making and blade-making
involves most of the same steps as the Japanese smithing tradition.
Another misconception is,
that Western swords were made from monosteel.
That was not true
up until the 18th century or so.
Before that, the way you just make steel
is by making bloom steel, and folding it.
The third misconception, is that Western swords
did not involve the combination of hard and soft steels.
That is not true. If you look at the data
hard steel was welded on as the edges
while the core was made from medium- or low-carbon steel, and maybe iron.
Which brings us
to the last misconception.
Both the Japanese and Western traditions, up until the 18th Century
worked with steels that are known as shallow-hardening steels
meaning that the steel doesn't harden all the way through.
That implies that you always have a hamon.
[gong]
Once I switch to the nagura stones, I have to adjust my stroking pattern.
So, instead of
back-and-forth motion
I have to start rocking the blade.
♫
Now that Ilya's done the foundation polish on our blade,
it's time to do an etch that's going to bring out the characteristics of the meteorite, and the twisted core
and it's going to start showing the hamon.
Then I'll have it back off to Ilya, and he'll be able to do the final polish.
♫
So, we're using ferric chloride as our etching solution.
It's about a 4:1 ratio, mixed with water.
This gonna have to probably sit for about fifteen minutes; we want a good, solid etch to show the pattern,
but not so much that it's going to make it more difficult to polish.
Let's go ahead and take a sneak peak.
Oooh, that's beautiful.
You can see in the center, where it has these three twisted bars,
the pattern's kinda
[clucking]
and then on the outside edge, you can see the hamon already.
♫
At this stage, I'm on to the finger stone polishing.
The finger stone I'm using is uchigomori hato,
which is a soft, final stone.
The paste I'm placing in is very refined grindstone mixed with baking soda.
At this stage, the polishing is so fine that any amount of unrestrained water
that might be acidic will produce incredible rust.
As you can see, the meteorite is so substantially different in its chemistry from tamahagane
that the etching pattern is much more obvious than the differences between the hard and the soft steels.
So, even with the finger stone polishing after the etching,
the hamon is less visible than the hata
so I have to pay very careful attention making it at least somewhat obvious.
For the karahada nogu stage, I have here a version of an iron oxide and I have clove oil.
So I'm going to mix the clove oil with the iron oxide
then I'm going to pour boiling water over the blade
and start polishing the surface of the sword with the mixture.
This will hopefully turn the softer parts of the steel
bluish-gray while leaving the hamon, whiter.
So Ilya's brought the pommel for me
the claw which is going to be holding the gemstone.
Our friends at Crystal Fox have supplied us with this very large piece of lapis.
It's described in the book as a sapphire, but of course this would be an enormous sapphire.
Right now, I'm just doing a test fit, make sure everything's gonna work
it's gonna hold, and we'll take this back out, it'll be etched, finished, permanently mounted
and then with the handle set on, this'll hold the whole sword together
and we'll be ready for demo.
♫