Secrets of the Samurai Sword, PBS *LINK*

Re: getting to the same end with modern steel

ThomD

>I think of Two Cherries as a fully useable chisel of relatively low quality standing. I have yet to use any chisel or knife that ourperforms a japanese blade. I have lots from both sides of the fence. If you throw in the full use cycle and hand sharpen the Japanese tool is even further ahead. If you machanically sharpen with hand touch ups the tool quality requirement goes down a lot since the edge can be returned to low but fully useable quality readily.

Re: getting to the same end with modern steel

ThomD

>"I have had a knife maker, not smitten by things oriental, make a convincing case that what was good for a sword steel is not best for a knife, or probably a chisel."

That is true, but what happened was they banned the manufacture of swords and the folks who made those adapted to other edged tools, not just woodworking tools. That went on for 150 years till today. There was never a "samurai sword", but rather the hotly held secrets of many craftsmen fighting it out in more than a marketplace, and then on to tools. So the good would rise to the top, and the bad would fall off. The chisels and planes are not made the exact same way as the swords.

"And I have had people tell me about feats done with Japanese swords that I don't think would stand up to scrunity by Mythbusters. For example, cutting a gun barrel through. "

Ever watch a western? I would be loath to judge real shooting by that standard either. Samurai swords are not designed to cut barrels and I am sure that is largely impossible. Nor was there a social meeting equivalence between gun shooters and Samurai. On the other hand asian guns are sometimes made of wood or perhaps bamboo, so at some time, someone probably did cut a gun in half.

"Which reminded me of a story my Sargent told a long time ago of a duel in the Pacific islands between a motivated sword bearer and a BAR. Lead beat steel."

There was an incident on Guadacanal, I think, where a fairly large formation of swordman, hundreds I believe, were moved down by fixed machineguns. If Letters From Iwo Jima is to be believed, that may have more to do with a desire to die in battle than to kill the enemy.

Re: getting to the same end with modern steel

ThomD

>"You would think in actual warfare anything goes and a sword hitting a metal ornament on a suit of armor would suffer similar damage."

To some extent that is post WWII thinking. After all the Japanese baned firearms succesfuly, to keep the fun in the game.

One wonders if the bamboo armour they wore was partly to stop the damage to the sword. :) A cousin of mine is sword crazy and lives in Japan, married, and tours around looking at swords. He does the art which is really similar to quick draw in that it consists of the rapid drawing of the sword directly to the killing blow. Like watching two cats size each other up at length until a brief explosion of flying claws.

Re: judging excellent results

ThomD

>"I used to get "excellent results" with steel router bits and saw blades, carbon steel kitchen cutlery, a PC XT and my VW bug. When carbide got developed I got vastly more excellent results with these improved products and ditto for the rest of the list, as almost every aspect of technology improved, including steel."

Well on the one hand I don't get better results with carbide whether cutting steel or wood. The only carbide router bit I have ever used that was razor sharp out of the box was the one that came with my Hitachi TR12 router... On the other hand people should not be fooled into the belief that Japanese tools are all old school. One could possibly argue about whether Japanese hand tools are better than similar western tools. It's a slam dunk that Japanese power tools are better. Probably 90% of the tools in the domestic catalog have no equivalent over here.

Improving steel is not necesarilly the issue. I don't think there is a western steel (to the extent we are even still making any) that was ever designed for making woodworking tools. One of my favorites was originally designed for gage blocks. So they can improve them all they wan't but we aren't in their minds as they design them. We are just picking up scraps at the table.