🚀 go-pugleaf

Michael Black <mbl...@pubnix.net> writes:


> Blacksmithing isn't technology?  Just because something is familiar 
> doesn't cease to make it technology.  It might be "old technology" but 
> still technology.

Oh, yes indeed.  Blacksmithing is very much a technology, some of it
many centuries old, some much more recent.  Some contemporary smiths
get deep into the most up to date details of metallurgy, alloys, heat
treating, even 3-D printing of differing alloy granules that are later
heat and pressure-fused and forged.

Personally, I'm intrigued by the aesthetics, ergonomics and physical
acts of hand-working a plastic medium to embody events  in mind,
mostly using the older, long-estalished tech.  See .sig, infra.

ObFolklore [but forging tech, not computers]:

In the early 70s, I had a chat with the blacksmith who worked in the
basement of the Dauphinee "block shop" in Lunenburg, NS.  He was
making hooks for tackle blocks, splitting the end of a piece of steel
stock, wrapping the split ends on a mandrill to form an eye, then
forge-welding the lapped ends. Why do it that way rather than
hot-punching the eye?  "It's stronger that way!", says he.

Well, forge welding is a skill that can be mastered but it's prone to
error, overlooked defects and outright failure.  A punched hole is not
(or at least far, far less so.)

It was much later that it dawned on me that the Dauhpinee shop had
been in operation for ca. 100 years and had established it's methods
when wrought iron was the article of commerce.  Since the late 19th
c., wrought iron has been completely replaced by low-carbon ("mild")
steel.  Mild steel tech produces a product that's pretty much
isotropic, uniform internal structre in all directions.  But wrought
iron was extremely anisotropic, had a lammelar stucture similar to
wood grain.  "Along the grain" and "across the grain" made a huge
difference in how you worked the medium.  And you would *never* make a
structural tension element by boring a hole near the end of, say, a 1"
pine board.  That would stress the grain in its weakest direction and
a chunk of wood would just pull out under tension.

Exactly the sme problem existed for wrought iron so a method that
wrapped the the "grain" of the iron around the hole (obviously not
doable with wood) was indeed stronger.  Or it had been in, say, 1900,
and HOWTO had been passed down from smith to smith ever since.

-- 
Mike Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada

http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/hotiron.html