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because it was ~10 times more expensive to make and took a lot of time.
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That it is. Having made a number of knife weight billets of pattern welded steel in the past, several friends and I set about making a sword weight billet one weekend last month. Intended to be a totally random pattern starting with five layers of 1075, two of hand file, one of bandsaw blade and one of nickle, it took three men, using a propane forge with a blower on the air intake ( this allows us to generate forgewelding heat ) and two 15 pound sledghammers it took us a full eight hours to get a billet weighing three pounds with dimentions of 2.2 inches high, 6.5 inches long and 2 inches wide and our arms we shot from the heavy hammer work. We are maybe 5% of the way to having this billet made into a sword blade at this point. This little experiment shed some light on the intense amount of physical work that would have gone into making these sorts of steels.