Ethnographic Arms & Armour - View Single Post

tom hyle · 30th May 2005, 07:39 PM

It looks like the body of the sword is built up of folded or layered metal with enough contrast between layers to make one suspect the contrast is deliberate; perhaps for appearance, or perhaps for a performance quality. There also appears to be an inlaid steel edge. If you look at the spine at the tip you may be able to see the edge bit pinched into a slot in the blade? The body metal is probably made by forge-welding a piece of steel to a piece of iron, then folding that (not very many times; the layers are large). The photos are nice, but they have their limitations; for instance the spine of the blade is often where you can see how the flatness of the layers run (ie. are the layers in the plain of the blade or are they perpendicular to it) I think you said they are parrallel, or in the same plain as the flatness of the blade. The shandigan profile makes it harder to tell, since the surface kind of swoops trough the layers. One occasionally sees Moro blades with "panel welding" like we'd expect on Yataghans or swerts/spathas (Oriental Arms had one or more example of this), but more commonly the layering runs in the plain of the blade. The whole issue of patterning on Moro blades seems to just be coming to light, and AFAIK it is still fairly mysterious. Every nation cannot be Japan and write the stuff down for us, and in all fairness, much of what they did has fallen to the difficulties of time, war, disaster, etc.....A scarf-welded edge bit would be one that was hammered on to one side of the blade, rather than being pinched into a centralized slot, and would be characterized by being visible for a very short distance on one side of the blade (only where the sharpening bevel comes down thru it), very narrow, as with an inlaid (pinched in, dogged in, qiangong) edge, but on the other flat it will be very wide because you see the whole piece of steel that is welded on. A place you can see this fairly readily on a modern commercially available product you can look at on the internet is Japanese fish knives. As with these it is usually encountered with a "chisel" or one-sided edge bevel.

30th May 2005, 07:39 PM	#2
tom hyle Member Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Houston, TX, USA Posts: 1,254	It looks like the body of the sword is built up of folded or layered metal with enough contrast between layers to make one suspect the contrast is deliberate; perhaps for appearance, or perhaps for a performance quality. There also appears to be an inlaid steel edge. If you look at the spine at the tip you may be able to see the edge bit pinched into a slot in the blade? The body metal is probably made by forge-welding a piece of steel to a piece of iron, then folding that (not very many times; the layers are large). The photos are nice, but they have their limitations; for instance the spine of the blade is often where you can see how the flatness of the layers run (ie. are the layers in the plain of the blade or are they perpendicular to it) I think you said they are parrallel, or in the same plain as the flatness of the blade. The shandigan profile makes it harder to tell, since the surface kind of swoops trough the layers. One occasionally sees Moro blades with "panel welding" like we'd expect on Yataghans or swerts/spathas (Oriental Arms had one or more example of this), but more commonly the layering runs in the plain of the blade. The whole issue of patterning on Moro blades seems to just be coming to light, and AFAIK it is still fairly mysterious. Every nation cannot be Japan and write the stuff down for us, and in all fairness, much of what they did has fallen to the difficulties of time, war, disaster, etc.....A scarf-welded edge bit would be one that was hammered on to one side of the blade, rather than being pinched into a centralized slot, and would be characterized by being visible for a very short distance on one side of the blade (only where the sharpening bevel comes down thru it), very narrow, as with an inlaid (pinched in, dogged in, qiangong) edge, but on the other flat it will be very wide because you see the whole piece of steel that is welded on. A place you can see this fairly readily on a modern commercially available product you can look at on the internet is Japanese fish knives. As with these it is usually encountered with a "chisel" or one-sided edge bevel.