Thoughts on plate armor tests and wrought iron.
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 มิ.ย. 2022
- Features 2% new footage!
Bloomery iron is very different from modern iron at a fundamental level. Before any armor test can be called definitive, it needs to be established whether the different grain structure of medieval steel makes a difference in practical terms.
It's likely any practical difference depends on the quality of the steel, very cheap steel had a lot more slag, as much as 15%, whereas the high end steel was folded, welded and drawn out many more times to work out the slag and there might only have been 1%, with the bulk of steel being somewhere in between the two extremes.
I'm also probably wrong about at least part of this. Feel free to leave any corrections.
A lot of experimental archaeology makes weird mistakes. My favourite was a guy who saw damage to archaeological shields, tried to replicate the results by throwing spears at a replica shield, and when it proved hard to hit them, determined that there must have been deep symbolic reasons to destroy your opponent's shield which would cause warriors to train for the express purpose of hitting the shield. The notion that the shields might not have been the target and that they were interposed between the bearer and an incoming missile never once occurred to him in the entire paper, despite that being the whole purpose of a shield.
lmao, that's straight bonkers
@@Omegaures And yet somehow it found a publisher. That whole field has issues.
This is fascinating, this could explain the artistic depictions of swords cleaving helms. Sure with modern steal that is bulls@#$, but a cheap low quality helmet in the 12th century made with hight amount of grains in it would split like timber if hit in the right manner.
The same thing could account for period depictions of arrows piercing plate armor.
Every time you come back you just deliver pearls and nuggets in an absolute fraction of the time any other channel would and this time, once again, you hit the nail right in the head illustrating the point splendidly.
Great video! This question of historical steel is also in my mind whenever I see people testing armor.
I think Tod from tod's workshop is preparing such a test.
He mentioned it as a potential extra.
@@MalcolmPL Indeed, and he's more than met the fundraiser's stretch goal, so we should at least see some kind of test of different steel grades.
This is actually incredibly useful to me, thanks. I had never heard of this
Thanks for posting this. It's actually quite compelling and would now like to learn more
Thanks for your time and effort. Your videos are fascinating.
Hey i saw your video on the Seven Generations, good point about Veganism. I am Vegan myself, have been for 8 years and you do make good points, despite me knowing a couple indigenous vegans (i'm not trying to tokenize them, natives are not a monolith just like any other nation)
The way i see it is that it should strictly be a settler driven thing. Of course i have my own criticisms about hunting but your way of life won't survive if you can't teach your kids to hunt. So many lessons get imparted during hunts.
Asking Native people to go vegan is like saying "we white people destroyed the earth, something you had nothing to do with; can you please uproot your entire lives and change your entire ways, once again, so that you can undo the damage WE have done?"
Also, I am French-Canadian and the whole Eastern Metis thing is driving me crazy. Ok, like 60% of French-Canadians have native blood to some degree. But we mostly descend from the French equivelant of Custer's Scouts. None of us give a single shit about the living relatives of the ancestors we hold hostage, holding them hostage in exchange for rights and special status.
"We were the nice colonizers" is a very outdated French-Canadian narrative and the Cherokee princess thing is even worse here cause we actually do have native ancestors. But it doesn't mean shit.
The narrative of the nice native loving French stretches all the way to Vermont where descendants of French-Canadians just go and say "Hey the French lived like the Natives so we pretty much are Native!" and pretend to be, what they assume are dead tribes like the Abenaki, and get grants to study petroglyphs they have no knowledge of. You can look this up.
Keep up the criticism about the French and Champlain cause there is still i don't know about my own people from the side that saw the worst of us.
On the subject of veganism, I will admit I have a bit of a vendetta, I've got vegan cousins who are kind and reasonable, but I've also met a lot of nasty vegans, and as always the bad apples sort of spoil the bushel. I once had a conversation with a vegan who believed that everyone north of sixty should be relocated to Toronto so that they would have affordable access to salad.
On the subject of hunting and meat eating, I don't see deer or coyotes as fundamentally different from humans. The deer have the same right to life that we do, but we're all animals and we all have our part to play. And provided farm animals are raised with love and care or the hunt is done honorably and respectfully, I see no moral problem.
On the other hand I will wholeheartedly agree that Industrial farming is an abomination, and Americans hunting with machine guns is disgraceful.
On the subject of the Metis, I'm not really qualified to give an opinion. But it seems bizarre to me that someone who is literally half and half doesn't qualify while someone who is only a sixteenth or so native counts. The word has taken on a meaning that I don't fully understand.
On the subject of the French, having read a bit of history and with my inherent cultural bias, I will admit, I have a very unromantic view.
@@MalcolmPL Your unromantic view of us is beneficial, no need for anyone to ever question it. I don't blame you, given what we did.
I used to go protest against industrial seal hunting and at one time a very kind and open minded Inuk was asking us questions in Ottawa and he got swarmed by vegans calling him a murderer.
That's very true on what you say about treating animals like people.
The whole Metis thing in Eastern Canada is corny. The native women who willingly took French husbands took the ones with shaved faces and who adopted Native customs since beards were seen as the ugliest thing on the planet. The children of those people stayed within long standing tribes.
The rest well, they were soldiers who were patriarchal and Catholic and just turned their children into Frenchmen. Not really a point of pride anyone should have.
If you're part of a longstanding nation and they all vouch for you that's all that matters.
Thanks for your response man, keep up the awesome work.
@@MalcolmPL If you want to cringe hard at the Eastern Metis thing here you go: th-cam.com/video/pHhMpBVLkb0/w-d-xo.html
Interestingly, tod in his arrows vs armour series actually had tests between several different materials to showcase how they perform versus each other against arrow impacts
super video man , really enjoyed it :D
Excellent thought
The sad thing about wrought iron is that there is only one source I know of that makes wrought iron commercially for sale... and it ain't cheap.
It is now one of those weird cases where the cheapest, most readily available material way back in the good 'ol days is now way more expensive than the fancy High-carbon springsteels of Today. Which makes getting your hands on properly made 'Poor-man's armour' would ironically cost more than one made from High carbon steel! :P
And that one company doesn't actually make new wrought iron, it just recycles antiques into bar form.
@@MalcolmPL yep
I don't know how I missed this video in my stream of subs but this really cannot be understated. It is downright annoying to see so many detailed tests just completely ignore the physiology of the steel, focusing just its hardness or tensile strength. Yet we know such a morphology can play a dramatic effect upon the performance of materials with such things as wood, leather, or linen. Although even when it comes to linen the technical makeup such as alternating weave patterns gets overlooked.
As a blacksmith i fully agree, i always found this super interesting and i had the same taught that many modern armour makers miss this point (probably as You said because it is too labour intense), so far i hawe only seen one single gauntled made by damascus steel, but that turned out to be made of modern nickel steel as it seemed whan i took a close up of the picture.
It had been genuinly interesting if there could be a teamwork of skilled people who where seriously interested in a fully tecnickally accurate project, i hawe dremt about see that being done but at the same time felt it being an owerwhelming tast to preform all by my self, in historcial times it was probably done by a lot of different craftsmen in a whole cahin, not as today whan one man has to do litterary everything from zero.
Yes, you’re right, you would need a team, I estimate you would need at least four highly skilled smiths with different specialties.
And then on top of that there are probably plenty of logistical difficulties that I haven’t thought of.
@@MalcolmPL I would gladly participate if there where more people interested and the logistic problems could be solved.
Despite over a decade of experience forging, I would have nothing to contribute to a project like that.
@@MalcolmPL You underestimate Your self mate!
I lack the specialized skills required by a project like that. My skills extend to knives and furniture, neither of which are terribly applicable.
It’s like asking an optometrist to perform trauma surgery, maybe he can muddle through, but he’s probably not going to do a great job.
Very interesting! Raises more questions though. Is it safe to assume the historical steel came from a rich person’s armor? If so was the smith any good? or did he schmooze his way to the top? I’d like to see a comparison of a nobles armor and a conscripted peasant’s, or the difference in steel quality from continent to continent. For example did the Middle East and Asia have higher quality steel than Europe? (I would assume they did) really cool video though
I read an excerpt from “the knight and the blast furnace,” by Alan Williams, he analyzed a great many suits of armor, he didn’t give exact numbers but he found a high degree of variability in the amount of slag.
However what we can say with certainty that armor was not made from the lowest grade steel, as the amount of slag limits how thin you can make the steel.
@@MalcolmPL I wish more people would put some thought in to things liked this. In school we got a lot of incomplete answers, or more often just wrong. Really basic things like “European armor wasn’t designed to stop arrows.” …..I have to stop there before it becomes an incoherent rant. lol
As a rule any armour as able to do the job its more how much the wearer suffered, even low quality iron armour was a arable to stop arrows if the wearer suffered carrying the extra weight to make it thick enough.
As for the quality of steel, each area had it's own way top select/make quality steel but often they did not bother to use such steel.
Japan has far better steel used in blades then in armour, as makeing armour thicker was fool proof.
In the case of maile, the process of drawing out the wires from the draw-plate actually helps to ensure that the quality of the iron going in is fairly good. In this process if you use an iron with a fair amount of slag it will snap. This practically limits the amount of... err... 'shitty' iron links in maile armour.
This is not the same for stamped rings in maile though. There are a fair amount of finds of 'not-great' solid links in maile.
@@SuperFunkmachine I'm unsure on how to feel about your last point given that Japan often used high quality steels for high end armors. This was probably more true with Japan's usage of plates in the 15th century. Especially with the development of proofed armors.
I've had this in mind when it came to the quality of historical steel, but is it possible to work modern steel into historical steel in anyway?
The short answer is no.
@@MalcolmPL Yeah, I'm kind an amateur when it comes ton metallurgy, so I just followed one idea from a forum that involved folding a piece of modern steel while reintroducing slags to form a historically plausible steel or what not.
I'm still really unsure of that, but do you suppose that the methods of making the plate should be taken into account as well? There's only two methods of making plate armors that I know of, and the last one is only from what I know about Japanese metallurgy. The first means of construction I've heard of being used for plate was case-hardening iron, and the Japanese method for making plates involved sandwiching iron with carbon steel. Are there any more methods I should be aware of, since that's something I'd like to know.
@@jonajo9757 I'm not familiar with the techniques of the high middle ages, so this may or may not be different, but in the dark ages sheet metal was made by either flattening and folding and flattening a piece of bar iron until it was the desired width (sort of like modern day damascus), or else by flattening a bar and then welding several together edge to edge to achieve the desired width.