What you see here is a one and a half inch square bar of mild steel getting ready for a pounding at Friis Forge.
Check out the channel if you're interested in blacksmithing, its linked in the description below.
Mild steel is readily available nowadays
and it's of better quality than what was available historically due to the high degree of material purity that modern crucible technology can achieve,
but the weapon reproductions they use for testing are also made of modern steel, so it's not an unreasonable comparison.
Helping with the forging as a striker was an interesting experience.
I've never tried blacksmithing before because I've never had the means to do so.
Setting up a forge in an apartment is not exactly feasible.
You notice immediately how much technique is involved, you don't just grab a hammer and swing it wildly.
Accuracy is very important, as is consistency and the correct hammer angle for what you're trying to accomplish.
What I also noticed is that because I don't know how to optimize the efficiency of each swing, it's more
exhausting than it needs to be.
An experienced blacksmith can smoothly
transfer the hammer bounce into the next swing to preserve more energy, whereas for me, it was a more jarring experience.
Flattening the steel bar took quite a long time. If I remember correctly we worked on it for about three hours.
One thing you should keep in mind is that I'm far from an expert on armor. I did some research to figure out
what would be a good thickness for the plate, but I found more variation than averages.
Depending on the type and time period, a breastplate could be anything from less than one millimeter to four millimeters, or even thicker.
Armor also wasn't made of uniform thickness the way most modern reproductions are.
The front of the chest and forehead were covered by much thicker material, while the sides were generally thinner.
The most massive plates were used during the Renaissance to provide protection against gunfire.
Here Christopher is cutting the flattened section of the bar so we can start drawing it out.
An angle Grinder would have been quicker, but it's neat to see it done the old-fashioned way.
And by the way yes, it does get quite hot in there, especially on a summer day.
A burning vice is oddly pretty, isn't it?
And back to hammering, lots and lots of hammering.
I only ended up keeping about 10% or so of the footage I recorded. Watching glowing steel be struck rhythmically
is nice, but I figured it would get too repetitive after several minutes.
In fact, this might still be too much. I don't know.
As you can imagine, hammering away for hours is quite a good workout and pretty rough on the hands.
I should have used gloves when swinging the sledgehammer, the rubberized handle is much more of a blister machine than any wooden handle.
In the video you can't tell just how loud it was, as the camera compensates by automatically lowering the volume to avoid audio distortion.
I'd imagine that historical blacksmiths tended to be hard-of-hearing especially, as they grew older. Well, maybe they still do today, I'm not sure.
So the steel is now flattened and drawn out quite a bit, and at this point
Christopher is taking over because more precision and experience is needed for the finer shaping.
If you end up working one area too much it well get overly thin quite rapidly, which can cause it to fail.
It's a matter of getting the thickness of the plate as even as possible, and to within our intended measurement.
Okay, so here's the piece that we're going to test: hand forged mild steel.
There is going to be a little bit of variation in thickness due to the nature of it being hand forged.
Right here we're at like two, two point one.
Two and a half here. And here we are at two millimeters.
Yeah, this is pretty much about a heart sized target.
Okay, so it looks like...
The edge of the point hit the edge of the plate. That's where the spark came from, and then went in right there.
This is where it hit. It did absolutely nothing to the armor.
So you'd really need a much more powerful crossbow than this...
and that's what they did. They didn't use the 350-pound ones to go though plate armor. It's just not happening.
First shot.
So here's the result.
The bolt is
completely busted, and I'm not going to shoot another one at it because even if I used a different point
I'm pretty sure the result will be the same, because as much force as this generates, if it hits the hard unyielding plate
thi-this is the only way it can go. This, this will have to break because it's just, I mean, you can see it's hollow...
and It just doesn't have the strength to support this sort of force concentrating on there.
We've got this tiny little...
divot here.
It's, yeah, there it is. I'm not sure just how well you can see that.
Right here.
It's like...
Like hitting it with a really tiny ball-peen hammer.
It really didn't do much of anything.
It's certainly...
noticeable right here. That was a lot of power.
Blacksmiths, they are known to pack a punch, aren't they?
So we've got this and we've also got...
This... if the damn camera would focus.
That'd be nice. So we've got some edge damage here. Nothing too too terrible, but it is noticeable.
That did just a little bit, there's not too much visible here.
This is really holding up nicely.
So I'm gonna try to drive it in, straight forward like that.
So here's the dent.
It's nothing major. This would have still hurt underneath, but it's not that bad.
Unfortunately the camera was acting up, the high-speed one. I didn't get that.
But I can't actually see where this was.
This is the previous one.
[Christopher] That's previous
That's previous.
I can't believe that it's not even...
Didn't even show up. So all the sparks must have come off the hammer, rather than the plate. Yeah.
Huh.
That's pretty weird.
It looks like this plate is pretty much indestructible.
This is damn impressive, like nothing...
Nothing can affect this thing.
It's like just cosmetic damages, nothing really serious here whatsoever.