What was the pilum made of?

[Magnus]

Probably takes longer to carve the wooden part of the shaft than forge the iron part of it.

Not if you include the fact that it had to be hammered from a large stock iron billet. These vary in size from about 250mm x 40mm to 300mm x 60mm.

David Sim in his book 'Iron for the Eagles' says that a billet hammered into a length 700mm by 13mm was enough to make a pilum shank.

He gives the production time for one pilum as 10 hours 26 minutes from billet to finished item using 13.5kg's of charcoal.

Quite expensive to produce! Sim suggests that as it lasted as a weapon over a considerable time period, and had several modifications to the design, that the effectiveness of the pilum, justified its expense.

Billet to forged bar
forged bar to flattened bar
'upsetting' the end to form the point
shaping the point
reducing the shaft with fullers and cross pein hammer
flattening the shaft
flaring the tang end and punching of holes.

Thanks for the information Adrian! If one pilum iron shaft takes 10 hours, do you think then perhaps that either A) the romans employed apprentice smiths to get it to the final stages, decreasing the time taken by the master smith? B) had pre-forged iron bars specificly for the use of making them into pilum shafts. Not that we have proof of it, but any down time a smith might have could have gone into pre-working a lot of weapons that took time to make.

HIJACKING ALERT! I think we're moving a bit into the iron shaft part here...the original focus was on the wooden haft. Now, I never for once said that the pila was a fire and forget weapon, because they have a lot of value, damaged or not. BUT, having said that, I also don't think it's a weapon of high quality when it comes to it's finishing and materials. Let's face it, it's not nearly as detailed or polished as a pugio or gladius. It can stay fairly rough and still be effective. Thus, I don't think that the wood choice for the wooden part really makes that much difference. Especially when a fair % of Rome's enemies weren't armoured to the point where it would make a difference.