The Strongest Swords are Forged in the Hottest Fires
Buckle up for some blacksmith-style learning.
“The strongest swords are forged in the hottest fires.”
I’ve seen and heard that aphorism more times than I can count. The people who use it always try to make it so poignant too, like it’s an incredibly nuanced concept or something.
For Adam’s random bugbears, this is right up there between those “let them” tattoos and platitudes without limiting principles.
Well, at the risk of sounding trite and snarky, I have news:
Those people are über wrong. I’ll explain.
We’ve been longtime Forged In Fire fans at the Hamilton house, particularly the earlier seasons when it was still hosted by Wil Willis. Not that Grady Powell isn’t great or anything, but he just isn’t our OG boy Wil. Wil brought a certain type of Converse-clad class to the whole thing that Grady just hasn’t been able to fill the shoes of, pun intended.
During the many, many hours I’ve spent watching and vicariously living through contestants crafting edged weaponry from various types of metals using multiple methods of smithing under short time constraints and non-ideal forging conditions, I’ve learned some things:
- Always wear eye protection.
- Mechanical fasteners for handles are important and far superior than adhesive-only handles.
- Never do a burn-through handle if you can avoid it.
- Thermocycling separates the boys from the men.
And finally, I’ve learned that AN EXCESSIVELY HOT FORGE MAKES THE STEEL TOO HOT SO WHEN THE BLADE IS QUENCHED IT BECOMES BRITTLE WHICH MAKES THE TEMPERING PROCESS PROBLEMATIC RESULTING IN AN EXTRA BRITTLE BLADE THAT ISN’T ACTUALLY STRONG AT ALL AND WILL LIKELY HAVE A CATASTROPHIC BREAK DURING THE STRENGTH AND SHARPNESS TESTS.
In reality, the fire in the forge needs to be a reasonable temperature and the smith needs to take care to not overheat the blade. It doesn’t need to be the white orange hue of a thousand burning suns when it goes into the quench; that’s what often results in warps, pings, tings, fissures, and delaminations.
Instead, it needs to be just the right temperature. A soft red glow from the blade before being quenched will do the job. It only needs to be hot enough to harden the steel, not completely obliterate it by way of supernova.
Now, take this new information and my abuse of caps lock and find a way to apply it as a metaphor to your everyday life or something.