The Serpent in the Sword is the title of a paper published by Lee A. Jones discussing
pattern welding in early medieval swords.
This video shows how to create such a pattern-welded sword including a visual serpent starting
just from small pieces of steel.
Pattern-welded swords are created by composing rods for visual effect.
Each rod contains multiple layers of differently constrasting steel.
In the example here, I am using carbon steel which etches dark together with a nickel steel
which etches more brightly.
Each rod is forged from an 11-layer billet with 6 layers of 1095 and 5 layers of 15n20.
Here you can see how I assemble them before welding them together in the forge fire.
While I am using modern steel and modern tools in this video, the process is still very similar
to the work of smiths a thousand years ago.
The serpent sword I am making here consists of 7 different bars.
Two of which are twisted to generate a star like pattern and one untwisted bar that I
use to form the serpent.
The result is going to look similar to the following picture.
However, it will take many days to get to there.
I will outline most of the required steps in the following few minutes.
After the billets have been prepared they are heated in the forge to a very high temperature
and then forge welded into a single piece of steel.
Forge welding requires that the contacting surfaces are clean and not oxidized.
To achieve this, I apply borax as a flux which will disolve any scale and keep the oxygen
from the surfaces that need to be welded together.
Light taps with the power hammer set the initial weld.
After several passes at welding heat, the billet can be forged more aggressively.
When looking closely at the hot billet, the different layers of steel can be easily discerned.
During the whole process, it's important to keep the scale from building up, so I frequently
use the wire brush for removing scale and apply small amounts of borax for fluxing.
The next step is drawing out the billets into long rods that can then be twisted or used
as straight laminate.
When assembling the sword from these rods, I want the rods to be almost at the length
of the sword blade I am aiming for.
That is once the bars have been assembled into the complete sword billet, I try to avoid
any additional drawing out of the steel to not distort the pattern.
This seems to be similar to how anglo-saxon or viking-age sword smiths assembled their
swords based on historical finds.
As a first step, I will draw out the billets to 1/2in square rods.
This takes a fair amount of time even using a power hammer.
Back then, this work would likely require several strong helpers with sledge hammers.
Once I reach the desired initial dimensions, that is 3/4in square, I further draw out the
bars to 1/2in sqare, before cutting them in half since more drawing out needs to be done.
Creating all the bars for the 3 sword blades I am making took almost two days of hard work
- even with the power hammer, this can be quite exhausting.
As a final step, I draw the bars out to 3/8in square which is the size I use for all the
bars going into this sword.
After I am done with this, I have 10 bars of straight-laminate that can be further manipulated.
To create a herring bone or star-like pattern, the bars need to be twisted in different directions.
I am trying to make the twists as tight as possible and this is made much easier by a
jig that can be operated by one person with an oxy-acetelyn torch for heating up small
sections of the bar.
The jig also provides support for the bar so that during the twising it remains completely
straight.
This is an enormous time saver since heating up the bars in the forge is more stressful
and complicated.
The serpent core of the sword is created by forge welding two bars of mild steel on the
outside together with one bar of straight laminate on the insight.
Since the process I am using for creating the serpent increases the length of the core
significantly, I start with 18in long bars.
The three bars are then carefully forge welded together.
The welds need to hold really well since the next step can easily tear the welds apart
if they are not solid.
The serpent is created by cutting small notches out from the mild steel bars in an alternating
pattern.
It is not clear if this is a process that would have been used historically since it
ends up wasting a lot of steel that back then was very expensive and time consuming to create.
Nonetheless, I like the visual appearance of a serpent created this way.
For this sword, I ended up creating three serpent cores to experiment with the process.
I also created small blade like pieces from the core to see how they would behave when
heat treating.
I had some concerns that the serpent might separate from the mild steel but those were
unwarranted.
Once the core has been prepared by cutting the notches on the bandsaw, it is forged into
a straight bar under welding heats.
This forging forces part of the straight laminate to fill the notches we cut creating the undulating
pattern that is responsible for the serpent look.
As you can see the bar is significantly longer now.
Before proceeding, I am removing the scale so that I can quickly etch the bar to see
if the pattern came out as I expected.
Etching a piece of pattern-welded steel almost feel like magic since a completely blank bar
all of a sudden reveals its hidden pattern.
The serpent core is flanked by two twisted bars.
The cutting edge of the sword is composed of one bar of W1 on each side of the pattern-welded
core.
As the bundle of rods gets wider, forge welding becomes much more challenging.
So, a lot of care and patience is required to not destroy a lot of work at this stage.
I speak from experience since this is what I did the first time I made this sword and
had to start all over again.
Again the weld is set by light taps with the power hammer.
Once the whole sword bundle has been welded together, a few more steps are required before
it takes a shape of what we might reconigze as a sword.
Here is a quick view of how the bundle looks after forge welding.
Although, I mentioned earlier that I do not want to draw out the sword any more after
it has been forge welded, a little bit of drawing out is required here to get the desired
length.
We are just talking about a couple inches.
To create the tang, I mark off two inches and use a black smithing helper to forge a
transition.
Once the transition has been established, the part of steel that has been separated
from the sword is aggressively drawn out to about 6in.
In this case, I was a little bit too heavy with the power hammer and created a tang that
is not quite as wide as I had wanted.
This will have to be corrected later on, probably loosing some length in the blade.
The final step requiring forge welding is to conduct a fish mouth weld that establishes
the tip of the sword.
This weld will cause the pattern welded core to run into a single point and cause the edge
billet to be exposed along the whole circumference of the sword blade.
To close the gap, multiple welding passes are required.
In this case, the forge welding is easier to do with a hand held hammer.
This pass can also be used to slightly taper the blade towards the tip.
It is important to create a good weld here since later on the bevels need to be forged
which especially at the tip causes a lot of stretching out.
Once the tip has been established, the only forging step remaining is to establish the
bevels which I will show in a later video.
So far from the very start I have spent about 7 days of work to create the sword.
While many critical steps have been successfully completely, there are still plenty of opportunities
for failure which may cause complete destruction of the sword.