Hey, Elyrians, after a three month break I figured it was time to start making some threads about arms&armor again.

At first I wanted to talk a bit about how certain types of armor interact with different types of weapons, to show that padded armor, mail, and plate work together quite well, while on their own they have certain weaknesses, but I decided to instead go with a wider topic first:

... what are things smiths could learn to do when becoming better at their craft?

(TOTALLY not because this was a topic in TTC)

General Smithing

• Heat treating and tempering

  Heat treating steel describes the process of bringing it to a certain temperature, and after some time quenching it either water or mineral oils. Depending on the contents of the steel the temperature you'd have to reach can differ quite a bit, and the medium you use for quenching also influences the outcome. After heat treating a steel you'd usually temper it, to make it less brittle ... for this you heat the steel up until it assumes a certain color, and then let it cool off slowly.

  Heat treating and tempering can greatly increase the hardness and stability of a blade, but doing it wrong can result in tiny cracks and thus a brittle, or already broken product.

• Crucible Steel

• Etching, Gilding, Bluing, Engraving etc.

Weapon Smithing

• Forge welding

(Not to scale!)

• Fuller

  A fuller is a groove going along the center of the blade, and serves two purposes. For one, it reduces the weapons weight, and secondly it increases it's stability, since it helps with distributing stress on the blade. While this might seem like something you can only do with swords, rest assured that you can do similar things with axes aswell.

• Differential hardening

  Together with forge welding this is one of the ways to get an very hard edge, without risking the sword being too brittle. To achieve this parts of the blade are covered by clay or something similar. The result is a blade with a soft back (which is why katanas usually bend instead of breaking) and an hard edge, which allows it to have different edge geometry.

Armor Smithing

• Fluting

• Articulation

Those are just some things from the top of my head, I will elaborate on those techniques or concepts some time soon, (probably tomorrow, so make sure to check back) for now you will have to do with pictures.

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