Safe Steel for Edged Weapons
Lancasters Armourie Limited ~ Safe Steel for edged Weapons
Individual Safety rules, Sword Steels and their makeup for “vigorous full contact” use.
More and more groups are expanding their competency boundaries with the aim of deriving more excitement and making it more professionally realistic. This is now being referred to as “full contact” (defined as; robust & vigorous fighting to defined target areas without pulling the strike). To achieve that we need Swords blades which will withstand brutal treatment (high speed impacts at +300 foot per second), “without losing it’s top 9 inches into a spectators head”.
It’s important to realise Sword Blades are a compromise. The art is to make a sword hard enough to retain its edges, but not so hard it breaks. These parameters are governed by two crucial main factors: -
I) The composition of the steel (its chemical elements).
ii) The conditioning of the steel by heat-treating.
So! What’s the problem?
Sword blades are subjected to awesome stresses during full “contact combat”. The average Swordsman will swing a sword through the air with a tip speed in excess of 200 foot per second, some achieve more than 350 ft per/sec (imagine -- 36 inches of steel moving almost as fast as a bullet). That energy has to dissipate somewhere, most of us simply stick our own sword in the way, resulting in 36 inches of steel coming to an instant stop! (except - the metal on each side of the impact point - they keep going)... Yep!!! Our prize possession is momentarily shaped like a banana, which is why some of the harder Swords break and zoom into the crowd like an unguided missile.
Surely steel is just steel!
UK steels have a British Standard Code (BS) for each category, which denotes its trace element composition, E.g.; “BS970; 080A52” (a Spring steel) has a larger percentage of carbon, but less manganese than steel for an anvil. Before the introduction of “B.S” ratings, steel was referred to by a “EN”code which still used by UK Sword makers, EN43, & EN45 (spring/carbon) are the most common steels for Sword blades.
Choosing the right metal has been the bane of weapons makers since the `Iron Age’. It all depends on your needs, your point of view and how far you are prepared to go, even ex British Steel metallurgists cannot agree on their idea of “The right Steel”.
