I love Mark Wahlberg, but at the rate he's swinging,
it would take him three f---ing days
to draw that steel out.
Hi, my name is Neil Kamimura.
I'm a bladesmith-blacksmith from Hawaii.
My business name is T Kamimura Blacksmith.
It was established in 1932, Hilo, from my great-grandfather.
Today, we're going to be looking at some
blacksmithing scenes and some forging scenes
of some movies, and we're going to see how real they are.
Robert Downey Jr. has the best hammer swing.
It looked like he had practiced.
He was standing close to the anvil,
and he's basically cold-forging mild steel.
So, cold forging is not using heat
to make it pliable like clay;
he's actually just hitting steel cold.
I don't quite understand,
for one, why he has the forge lit in the back,
since he's cold-forging it.
I don't know what he was doing,
'cause the steel had no color to it.
He was probably forging it at low heat,
just getting it to work.
But he's cooling it off because it looks cool.
They love the steam.
It looks like he's holding a cup of tea
because the crucible isn't hot.
I personally don't think it would create a perfect ring.
It would have to be a wax mold
that you cast from both sides with sand.
It wouldn't just be pouring some hot tea on it
and then it makes a perfect, polished,
electronic-ready ring.
I would give this a 7,
only because I like "Iron Man."
Rambo: You know what you are;
what you're made of.
Oh, boy. This is the one that
I absolutely hate the most.
And it's not because I don't like "Rambo." I love "Rambo."
But the problem is that, for one, that's a real shop.
That's a shop that somebody's worked out of,
so there was somebody in that vicinity
that knows what they're doing.
Two, Sylvester Stallone
sells a "Rambo" knife every release,
and he has knife-maker friends.
I'm friends with Jason Momoa;
I would never let him do a forging scene like this
in a million years.
And he's using a ball-peen hammer,
like, out of a mechanic's chest.
A ball-peen hammer is a pound, or maybe 12 ounces.
My hammer's 4 pounds.
And I'm pretty sure he likes to lift weights,
so I don't know why he wouldn't use a real hammer.
Rambo: What you're made of.
See, right there, he just keeps hitting it on the end.
All he's doing is putting square hardy holes,
markings in the bottom of that thing.
So, here's your anvil, right?
You have the horn.
So sexy, right? You got this horn,
you got this nice curve on the back, right?
And then you have the center mass in the middle.
Then there is a 1-inch square hardy hole,
and that is meant for putting tools in there.
You have to remember that the steel is hot,
and you're just banging on a square hole,
you'll flip it over and you just have
square-hole marks all over it.
I don't know why they don't tell him,
"Hey, buddy, hit on the center of the anvil.
Why do you keep hitting it over the hole?
Rambo: When you're pushed.
When you take steel at that temperature
and you quench it in water, it microfractures.
5,160 should be quenched in oil.
But it doesn't need to be quenched,
because he's obviously not done forging it
and didn't make anything but a pancake
on the end of a leaf spring.
Two, it's some magical water,
because he quenches it in water and he lifts it up
and it's still hot,
which, that is also not realistic.
You put it in water, it would lose its heat immediately.
Maybe he just sucks at forging so bad
that it was so thick that he didn't do anything to it,
so it still held its heat.
I hold this to a higher accountability,
as every "Rambo" movie,
he's forging.
How many "Rambo"s is there?
Like, five f---ing "Rambo"s?
How has no one been like, "Hey, buddy, you absolutely suck.
You should not do those scenes anymore"?
Or, "Go take one lesson to do it."
I give it a 1. F--- "Rambo."
Like, I love the movie,
I just don't like the forging scenes.
So, the fact that he could take the handle off
with two taps of a hammer,
it definitely wouldn't have survived battle,
as you are hitting edge to edge.
But at least they took the handle off on this one.
Some of them are pinned, and a lot of them are through,
and then the pommel is what holds it on.
But you definitely can't just take it
and be like
and then it comes off.
You know what I mean?
So, when you're melting steel
in an open-faced crucible like that they were doing,
one, there wouldn't be just, like, orangey flames.
It would be the most insane, looking at the sun.
That's one. Two, the actual crucible itself
would need to be hot.
That is just black, so it didn't heat up,
but yet somehow, the sword is melting on a black surface,
which is the most ridiculous thing ever.
Swords that were poured
and casted like that were bronze.
They weren't steel.
It takes about 3,000 degrees
to melt steel, that kind of steel.
Bronze is a lower melting temperature,
and so that was a lot easier to melt and cast,
but when they do cast it, it wasn't in an open face.
On both sides was it casted, so that you pour it in the top
and it fills up and makes a perfect mold.
The sword would look like a cookie on a baking sheet,
so that's just bulls---.
I don't quite understand
how they got one sword and melted it,
and you've somehow made enough to make two swords now.
You actually lose mass
as you melt steel like that.
I would definitely give that a 4.
The thing that I did like about this scene
is that they had it actually in a cast, in a mold,
and he was breaking the mold out of it.
There's many different techniques.
You can cast an ax because it's
generally not made out of very great steel,
'cause it needs to take a lot of abuse,
versus, like, a chef knife has to be the highest quality
of carbon steel because it needs to be razor sharp.
Axes are brute force that needs to be tough
versus razor sharp.
I've never seen a steel butt forge weld
like that in one hit, and it wasn't hot enough.
And if you ever put wood next to something that hot,
it would disintegrate.
You don't hold it to such a high accountability,
because it's not real.
A tree dude is giving his arm for a handle.
I mean, you can't take it too seriously.
I don't understand why he didn't just cast it in one,
but there's no way you could forge-weld something like that.
6.
I don't know.
For all his big muscles, and I love Mark Wahlberg,
but at the rate he's swinging,
it would take him three f---ing days
to draw that steel out without any breaks.
Like, literally, it would take him three days
at that hammer swing.
It's the weakest swing I've --
I mean, it's pretty bad.
He loves the hole too. You see him hitting it on the hole?
They all love that hole.
Nobody wears a glove on their hammer hand, ever,
because it's dangerous to hold a hammer in that hand
with a glove, because it will just fly out of your hand.
But if you are going to wear gloves in a blacksmith shop,
they need to be a glove
that you can shake like this and they fly off,
because once that leather gets so hot,
it will cook your hand internally within seconds.
You see people freak out, and they can't get the glove off.
It will cook your hand like an oven.
Evan: Are there things you just know how to do?
Right there. You see, generally,
you don't quench "finished" forged blades
that look like a road going up to a mountain.
That thing curvy as, crooked as can be.
Once it quenches like that, it's done.
You'll have to slowly take the work --
nobody ever would quench a crooked blade.
Two, he's only heating the tip.
So, basically,
he's heating this much right here,
so only this part of the blade would be hot.
This would all be soft, and it would catch a bend,
it would catch a warp.
Traditionally, in Japanese weapons,
the blade is straight as forged.
There's a clay on the back to prevent the spine
from getting hard, so it protects it from the heat,
and then only the edge is exposed.
The edge is getting hard,
and that's what creates the natural curvature
of a samurai sword.
So you do not go in f---ing all bent and crooked, for one,
and two, you don't forge the bend in.
It's actually quenched,
and through the heat-treating process does the blade bend.
This is the best part of all time,
where he cuts a steel pipe.
[laughs]
Swords do not cut pipe.
People think that samurai swords
are the baddest things on the planet,
and they are, for their time.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that it was the toughest
and that it can cut through cement and cut through --
no, they were actually, some of them had a lot
of mild steel in them. A lot of them caught bends, broke.
And this movie is about him doing it traditional, right?
That's not how traditional Japanese bladesmiths
test a finished product.
And they are a culture so based out of respect,
you're not supposed to even touch the steel with your hand.
They would not take it and hit a f---ing pipe with it.
It would be the ultimate disrespect for them.
I'll give him a 2.
If you look at the first initial scene,
there's one, two, three, four, five,
six pieces of broken sword,
and then when they go to put it back together,
it's only two pieces.
So, flux is, it's like borax.
So basically, as it heats, it's almost like melted glass
that cleans it so that it allows it to stick together.
As you're forging something on a flat surface
and you're hitting it with a hammer,
it would never maintain that fuller.
And the fuller is that curved spot
down the middle of the blade. It's on both sides,
so as you hit it, it would just flatten it out.
The correct way to fix a broken blade like this
would be to take the handle and the guard off,
cut it up into smaller pieces, add more material,
and forge-weld it again and forge a new blade
if you want to keep the same steel.
Look at the guy swinging. [laughs]
You can just tell by their swing
that they've never touched a hammer in their life.
And it's not nearly hot enough
to just butt-weld a forged blade together.
To forge-weld, it's at 2,300. It's a brighter color.
It's not orangey, it's white.
6, because they were actually
forcing air into a coal forge.
They were putting flux on there to try and forge-weld it.
So another, once again, another open-face mold.
And then he forges it.
I have no idea what he's doing
or what kind of oil they put on there to make it do that.
They're putting either grease or wax or oil,
and they're putting it on the hammer
so it creates this whole fire,
but they don't care about whether
or not the steel was actually hot enough
or where he's hitting it on the anvil.
Look at this! Just the tip is hot, look.
And then we're going to quench this sword into snow.
Oh, Lord.
So, what happens is, when you take a sword like this
and you quench it into oil,
the reason why they move it up and down
as they're quenching it
is because what it does is it's so hot,
it creates a vapor jacket that comes around it,
and so it's boiling all around it, so it's vapor,
so you're not actually rapid-cooling it
unless you're introducing it into new oil, right?
So quenching it into snow,
it would just instantly melt around it
and then not touch it at all.
I still sharpen knives on a stone, too.
Maybe not a stone like that,
but, I mean, they probably just picked it up
and was like, [laughs] you know, I don't know.
I would rate that a 5 just because it was from the '80s
and they didn't know any better.
As she's hitting the anvil,
she's like, tap-tap, then hits the anvil.
Like, you're not even swinging it that hard.
You don't need to pump your brakes.
It's the most ridiculous thing ever.
If you ever see a video of me forging,
I'm swinging a 3- to 5-pound hammer,
and, yes, sometimes when I move the blade,
I have to keep my hand continuing to swing.
I don't understand how she's engraving with a nail.
It's, like, a log-cabin nail.
So, this right here is my forging stamp.
It's done hot, and it's pressed in.
I just hit it with a hammer.
Yeah, I give it a 4.
It wasn't hot enough at all to forge-weld,
and that's basically what they're trying to replicate.
As you're forging it and you keep folding it,
it takes out the impurities.
They're trying to hit it,
and they can't even keep it on the anvil.
But how they turn that little puck
into a half-inch-thick plate with perfect square edges
when they swing a hammer like that is beyond me.
And so why make a plate that's bigger than the anvil, right?
You can't forge-weld it.
Look at it. It's just rocking on its own.
You only want to open it so much to fold it,
because how would you create enough even pressure
to forge-weld that together?
You would hit it here, and then it would forge-weld here
and then break loose here.
You would hit it here.
You want constant pressure of reduction.
I would rate this a 3.
I don't have a favorite of any of them.
I don't think movies in itself
have ever captured it.
It's just annoying because it affects me.
They're like, "All you do is pour the knife.
It's not that hard."
And I'm like, "B---, I swing a hammer for a living."
I sacrifice my body to swing a hammer.
They think I just pour it in a mold, you know?
So, hopefully now, this gets enough exposure
where they might actually do a good one.
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