Editing Sword (section)

=== How not to make swords ===
	
[[image:Conan sword casting.jpg|thumb|300px|left|How to make a sword shaped ingot of pig iron which is of less value to you in a fight than a nice heavy stick]]
	
Making a sword from steel is a fairly complex and tricky process. Generally it was done by specialized swordsmiths once societies got big enough to support them. Common village blacksmiths could make swords, though not good ones. Making a steel sword involves taking a form of ferrous metal (be it an ingot of iron, a hunk of scrap metal or a sandwich of different types of steels) and heating it until it got soft, gradually hammering it into a sword shape, re-heating periodically as it cools during forging and then getting reheating it again to temper it and quenching in oil to give it strength. A sword does take a fair bit of time to make. As it's a tricky job, swordsmiths did not live alone in isolated workshops but rather worked together in guilds to help train new swordsmiths, while whole families (male and female) were involved in the process of making swords one way or another. They were also not adverse to using mechanical assistance such as water powered trip hammers to help them get things done quickly and efficiently, though forging by hand did allow them to be more precise about things, so it was a case of "Am I being commissioned to outfit a unit in bulk or to make a masterpiece for an officer?".
	
[[image:Chinese_Trip_Hammers.jpg|thumb|300px|right|Trip Hammers, for when a smith does not want to use his muscle for all the hammering]]
	
In any case, as it gets the hell beaten out of it during forging what you start with does not look like what you get when your done. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E6TzT0eCYs What a medieval swordsmith would not do is cast a sword shaped form of Pig Iron (the type of liquid iron which you can make with pre-industrial technology, full of impurities and carbon), wait for it to cool into a semi-solid form, hammer it on an anvil for a bit and dunk it into water.] If you try that and it does not shatter on the anvil or shatter after being dunked into water due to cooling so rapidly, it will shatter after the first blow. Note that casting was a legitimate way to make one type of sword; the ones made of bronze, although bronze swords do not match up to the performance of a properly-made iron sword. (Note for the pedantic: you CAN quench in water instead of oil, but it's extra work for no real benefit since you risk warping the blade and need to temper it afterward).

Also, nobody ever quenched a blade by thrusting it into a living guy's chest. That is an obvious bit of often repeated embellishment and rumor about Damascus Steel blades (which were made with the previously mentioned sandwiches of steels) which wormed its way into folklore and you're a moron if you think otherwise.
Firts there's a, let's say, logistical problem: a sword is a meter long or more, and you need to immerse it completely to get a proper quench - and the supply of people at least a meter thick is quite unreliable outside America... Or did they use elephants and walruses? Then there's the metallurgical problem: when you quench steel you want it to cool in a quick, controlled and homogeneous way to avoid warping and having differtial hardening where you don't want differtial hardening. Flesh is not a good at dispersing heat, so your sword will probably not harden at all, and even if this gruesome process did somehow work, you'd need an army of clones to get repeatable results.