Three or five or seven heat treat cycles to get the real stuff out of the blade!

Gosh, where do I begin?? I have spent a lifetime debunking these things and the list is so big I can't even process it anymore. It is like a hydra, cut one head off and seven more will grow, and they have a life of their own, laying low only to crop up with slightly different version with the next generation, and if there is money to be made off the myth then just give up, you can never come between people and a fantasy that they can pay for. So I think I will just let you folks jog my memory on a few I probably forgot.

I will however mention the one genre of myth that I think has bothered me the most over the years- all the myths surrounding Japanese blades. 1. It disrespects some really great blades by piling so much rubbish on them that nobody cares about their true qualities, only the hyperbolic myths. 2. (probably the real thing that sticks in my craw) they almost always come from a position of utter disrespect or disregard for any bladesmithing outside of Japan. You guys know what I am talking about, when it is made clear that if you were a "real bladesmith" you could make blades like those guys in Japan. When I was once told that real bladesmiths, ones in Japan, had to train for five to seven years to do what they do, I finally snapped and explained that I had been doing this since I was eleven years old, and seven years really didn't impress me all that much.

I am sure as they are listed I will not be able to help myself from replying- "oh yeah, that's a classic!" The problem is that you should probably be prepared to get some sore toes with this topic, the reason these myths hang on is the number of people who don't think they are myths... <img src=' http://www.americanbladesmith.com/ipboard/public/style_emoticons//wink.gi f' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

Ha! I'll be watching this topic closely as I've been they guy who has spent an embarrassing amount of hours sifting through the plethora of information posted on the forums, youtube, instagram, etc. that you've mentioned. Being new, IT IS TOUGH wading through all of the unproven theories, gadgets and B.S. out there. At one point, I too remember reading something about quenching your blades facing magnetic north, with the blade facing up to eliminate the need for tempering..... <img src=' http://www.americanbladesmith.com/ipboard/public/style_emoticons//huh.gi f' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':huh:' />

Don't wanna get all mushy and have it go to your heads, but I'd like to note that after finding this forum, joining the ABS, forwarding my weekly allowance to the ABS for books/videos, and spending a week at Mr. Caffrey's shop, I'm finally able to enjoy my free time building and testing knives rather than surfing the web looking for honest answers. Thanks for shootin' straight around here guys!

Glad to do it Matt. One I have seen a few times recently. You need to quench in used motor oil because the metal bits in it can add carbon to your blade. I am sure the blade they were referring to was a railroad spike. I mean how do you even come up with that????? You will need a lot higher than austenitizing temp to add things to the steel, umm like a re melt. One of those "say what??" moments.

Mike you mean multiple quenches are not needed? Say it aint so. Lol.

Brion

Ill play,

1 edge packing...

2 I heard you should quench in ... (insert anything not safe and free nastier the better)

3 full tangs are stronger.. really hate that one

and because I make swords

1 conans sword was 40lbs

2 doubling down on Kevin's Japanese sword myths.. person worst is the cutting through a machine gun barrel.

3 euro swords weight 8-10 lb and are clubs.

I am sure I have more but that is all I got off the top of my head.

I've recently been researching the history of wootz which has spawned many a myth. My favorite is that you could toss a silk hankerchief into the air letting it land on a sword of wootz where it would cleave in two upon contact.

Gary, I saw that in a movie so it must be true!

I have to second Matt's peeve. A full tang is stronger than hidden tang. That one makes me grit my tooth. <img src=' http://www.americanbladesmith.com/ipboard/public/style_emoticons//smile.gi f' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' /> (In reference to an Arkansas myth)

My favorite is the HC RR spike thing. How many forums and social media groups have hosted the argument?

My second would be the full vs hidden tang strength argument.

Good discussion Brion!

Bob

My grandmother would only cut her hair and finger nails and toe nails during a particular moon. She believed they grew back slower that way. She also said you plant seed during another moon because they would germinate faster. She came form the old country, Italy.

Everyone thought she was nuts.

Later that science was proven correct and agriculture companies uses that same notion today to plant seeds.

I'm sticking to the true north quench, doesn't hurt anything and I have a compass app on my I phone. Grandmother smiles at me every time I do so.

Great topic, fun stuff.

I think the one myth that kills me worse than the rest is the triple quench. There are others that I've been aware of through my learning process but that one seems to be the hardest to convince some people it's a load of bull.

As it turns out I actually had a couple of Power Point presentations on sword/blade myths that I had done talks with and forgot about. Here are just a few that I touched on, minus the ones that are just odd marketing claims, or total misunderstanding of metallurgy, rather than true myths:

Forging a blade somehow transcends the limits of steel, physics and chemistry by- packing molecules tighter, fracturing grains smaller, hammering the carbon into the steel, aligning the crystals with the edge, making the steel denser, etc., etc. (ad nauseum).

Damascus steel… Need I say more? And it would take a whole separate thread to deal with it all if I did. I actually had an entire presentation just on damascus steel myths.

As previously mentioned- Japanese swords… Need I say more? Yet another whole new thread needed.

Swords were quenched into slaves. Matt has to love hearing this one as much as I do, it never gets old… even after the tenth time you hear it that day. I once had an old guy tell me that he had a friend who had an old family sword analyzed and they found proof it had been quenched in a slave’s body. Interesting how the need to provide scientific proof is always carefully balanced with one degree removal to a friend or “a guy I know”, or sometimes just “they”, to protect the actual speaker from producing that same scientific evidence.

Speaking of quenchants- all manner of disgusting additions to the purest spring water, collected under a certain moon (which makes one wonder why you bother with the pure spring water if all you are going to do is pee in it anyhow) then add bugs, blood or anything else that elicits the gag reflex. Or any number of bodily fluids of a virgin, which may as well be unicorns blood in 2017. <img src=' http://www.americanbladesmith.com/ipboard/public/style_emoticons//wink.gi f' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

Swords are a special steel that can be struck edge to edge with no damage at all, we just don’t know how to make that steel today, in fact…

…if we could figure out how the ancients made their super steels we could replace our inferior modern metals and do anything! I could never understand how we built mile high structures and put people on the moon surface with our horrible penchant for forgetting our most valuable technologies and substituting them with increasingly inferior products and approaches. Perhaps aliens helped, yes that must be it!

All swords make that exact same metallic “schliiing” sound, when you draw them from the scabbard, especially a wooden scabbard!

One can affect the stiffness of the blade with heat treatment, or merely flexing the blade will tell you anything about the heat treatment.

Ancient blades were better because forging in charcoal added carbon to the blade. Why only certain carbon-based fuels can do this, who knows. And let’s just not talk about that pesky decarburization at the anvil.

The most common method of manufacture of ancient blades was casting in open sand molds, and the liquid steel always looks oddly like lead (silvery, not incandescent)

Quenching in snow; don’t laugh, Conan’s dad did it, I saw him do it! And the resulting blades could cut other swords in half.

The steel in ancient blades was folded 200 times or more, in other words reduced completely to forge scale.

A magnet will tell you the exact temperature to heat treat any steel, that is, if every steel has a soak temperature of 1414°F.

The best swords were “razor” sharp. One of my personal pet peeves. T.V. loves this one. Anybody using this horrible cliché has obviously never worked with swords or razors.

And just when you think you have heard them all, a whole new one gets gifted to you. As happened recently when Peter Johnson and I were doing a forging demo and one particularly obnoxious individual, who made it clear was a better smith than both of us put together, explained how flat dies, even properly radiused ones, permanently destroy the inner structure of the steel, and that when forging on the edge of the anvil you must swipe your blows toward the anvil in order to drag metal back into the blade to make it denser rather than pulling it apart.

To be honest, I always thought using a compass to set your quench tank to be the most benign of most of the myths I have heard, more like an O.C.D. thing rather than bad information. Adjusting that crooked picture on the wall when my host leaves the room doesn’t have any real effect on the world but it makes it easier for me to have an undistracted conversation when they return.

Once when I told a fellow bladesmith that I had a list of "the dumbest things I have heard bladesmiths say", he asked if I planned to make a career with the list... <img src=' http://www.americanbladesmith.com/ipboard/public/style_emoticons//biggrin.gi f' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' />

P.S. learned something today and I feel stupid now. After years of typing temperatures for people and struggling with that superscripted "o" degree symbol, I just learned that all you have to do is type "alt"+ "248" and it will magically appear under the curser. No kidding, just did it for the first time when writing "1414°F" for this post. Better late then never, I guess <img src=' http://www.americanbladesmith.com/ipboard/public/style_emoticons//tongue.gi f' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':P' />

Here's one that many may not have heard of:

Most have probably heard that hanging a horse shoe with the open side up will keep the luck from coming out. But, did you know that if you hang one with the open side down above your anvil, the luck will go into the anvil?

BLOOD GROOVES!!!!

Oh yes, good one Matt! All you have to do is say the miserable words, no explanation needed. I think that would be in my top five that make my teeth itch just to hear it. Once, after I forbade the work “blood groove” to be used in my class, I had a student who took me aside to lecture me on how the fuller broke the vacuum inside the human body so that you could withdraw your blade <img src=' http://www.americanbladesmith.com/ipboard/public/style_emoticons//rolleyes.gi f' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':rolleyes:' /> . When faced with a mind that works that way all you do is smile and walk away.