flint striker question

All in all you are correct - or at least I cannot quote any informed rebuttal ;-) Careful about those assumptions. To say that the point of science is to avoid assumptions is correct in philosophy and almost never true in practice. This is what I call the religeon of science. Everybody starts with some basic assumptions and the experiment is always affected by the experimenter. I've heard of some of the texts you metioned. I'll have to try to get aquainted with them- sounds like interesting reading. I still think edge packing is one of those hand-me-down practices from the bronze age.

GA

GA, sounds like you're getting smarter like CW is, over in r.k. ;)

Don't let Andy D's flamboyant wording throw you, ride it out for at least 8 seconds. ;)

For sure, we need to take advantage of the inter-library exchange system. :)

Cold rolling steel breaks up the grain and toughens it. They put Mn in the steel for just that purpose too! No shit. ;)

Don't know where to draw the line tho. :(

Edge packing sounds like a dumb idea to me, it's so easy to screw up the whole thing when it was "good nuff" before. I mean good enough as in "58hrc is about right for the hardness of a knife blade" crap.

How's "edge packing" going to help that piece of ordinary crap anyway? ;)

It's so much easier, better and more straight forward for industry to go with A2 than edge pack 1095, the use has been totally thrown out.

Hmmm... do you think it help my 66+hrc 1095 blades to edge pack 'em?

;)

Alvin in AZ

Here is a url for a knife making video

I bought it and found it quite informative.

Truer words were never said. :)

Another thing that bothers the heck out of me is when they suddenly realize those old timers were smarter than they thought! Grrrr...

Snooty bastards. :/

That guy spent his whole life in and around school if he were to be thrust back, he'd friggin get sick and/or starve to death in no time.

People all along have been doing the best they can with what they had to work with and were using all the brain power they could muster, which I believe was more than the "fudal/slave" system we live in now requires.

And not just different knowledge... the stakes were more immediate and higher both, for their whole lives.

Not for a second would I want to trade places with those in the Hanoi Hilton but I figure there were people back in pre-history (or even right now -today- in certain places) would loved the hell out of being in there. It's all relative.

Just read an article in the Science News about Neandertals (their spelling) and how smart they were... it was cool and about friggin time someone recognized that. :)

Alvin in AZ

Ken Rose Spaketh Thusly:

It's not there anymore. Just a few days ago I was finally getting around to downloading it and it was gone :-(

-- Bill H. [my "reply to" address is real]

Molon Labe!

In around 1900, the Germans modernized their spelling, and the 'h' went away. A hundred years later, we're catching up with them.

Neandertal = Neander (a particular river) + Tal, which means approximately valley. Valley of the Neander, and its inhabitants.

- ken

wrote in message news:ckk7vh$san$ snipped-for-privacy@reader2.panix.com...

I have to confess to having my own "assumptions" and prejudice. I firmly believe that most folks are not comfortable not having the answers. Goes the same for both religion and science. The same teacher I mentioned earlier tried to tell his class that Native americans were the only ones to develope the hand held spear thrower - forget the name at the moment. I went home and dug up an article on the Australian Aborigine version and brought it to him. He barely looked at it and never mentioned it again. I can't claim to be really well educated in much of anything but I've yet to be convinced that we really know much about the things that took place a thousand years ago and more. Some of them, but not comprehensively nor globally. We do know that civilizations came and went. Some of them were around for far longer than what we call modern civilization. To say that we are the first to do this and do that could easily be our own arrogance talking. Maybe human beings evolved as recently as we can account for and maybe not. Archeology has a lot of maybe's built into it and written histories have a lot of bias. This world has been around so much longer than we can account for that whole civilizations could have grown up and moved out of the neigborhood or more likely just plain died out many times over. We know that fossils need some pretty special circumstances to survive for even a couple thousand years. We know that land masses move. We sort of know that there were some well developed cultures happening around the world only a couple thousand years ago yet that's just a blink in the eye of geological history. I admit to my own brand of romanticism. I like believing that we might not be as unique as we seem to think we are. It leaves a lot of what-if to contemplate.

And distorting the grain/crystal structures create work hardening but how many bladesmiths do you know that don't routinely normalize their work after forging? It's standard practice to normalize a few times before quenching at least - so those stresses go out the window and at the same time you are refining the grain for toughness through heat treating. If you forge to reducing heats as you get closer to a finished product you could get some refinement from packing. Maybe some of that refinement could get carried through the normalization and quench. Maybe.

GA

Would that be Andrew Jordan? British maker working out of Holland. Goes through the making of a multiple-twisted-bar pattern-welded knife. Folded Kaowool over his blades for annealing, IIRC. He's on

The URL for the video changed - Luckily for me, it is in English with Dutch subtitles.

Of course, if that isn't the video you meant, ignore me, I'll go and sit in a corner

Peter

Nothing wrong with a big schnozz and bushy eyebrows....

There aren't any corners, this is a round robin discussin'. It drives the cats nuts, no corner to pee in. Maybe that's why the President always seems to have a dog, no corners in the Oval Orfice.

Charly

snip

snip

it sound like what jim hrisoulas describes as austenite forging in "the complete bladesmith) in chapter 4. if the distinguished gentleman is here he can shed some light on the subject and how much heat treating affects this.

son_of snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com (rpayne) Spaketh Thusly:

Check the latest issue of Blade magazine, edge packing is covered in an article on knifemaking myths.

To me, a packed edge always seemed kind of like compressed water.

-- Bill H. [my "reply to" address is real]

Molon Labe!

Thanks for the links! I was bummed that I couldn't find it. I get something out of that video everytime I watch it.

GA

Charly the Bastard wrote: >

Ask me again in two hundred years, I bet I can find several who are doing just that.

Maybe, maybe not. Personally, I carve 'Acme Instant Rock Corp." in every patch of wet cement I can find, just to screw with archeologists. Maybe they'll mistake all those Roadrunner cartoons for commercials, that would be a hoot.

Charly

finally got a hold of the issue. to my understand it seems a question of nomenclature. that is "edge packing" is a bygone term from when metalurgy was poorly understood. while the term seem to imply atoms are forced together, what really is happening is grain refinement. if i were to guess, the term "edge packing" probably came from busted blades where the appearence of large, unrefined grain was common in inferrior blades and smaller grain was found in superior blades in an era of forged blades. some semi-intelligent soul figured the smaller grain was the result of the same mass of material being compressed or "packed" into a smaller volume.

does this make sense or doea it sound like i'm blowing smoke?

Wow, that's prob'ly the most sensible thing I ever read about edge packing. :)

Alvin in AZ

Makes perfect sense to me. Ergo, *proper* heat treatment should be able to take the place of *proper* forge work in that respect. Lest anybody think I am a proponent of stock removal over forging, forget it. I just think they are both valid processes to an end. Personally, If I have the skill to hammer it into place I would rather go that route. It cuts down on the time spent on the machines and just feels more organic. It also tends to introduce some happy surprises that might not have occured on the grinder.

GA