about swords, iron/steel and some physics

[XorX]

[i]Doing tests on "welded steel" is not the same as historical steel. It is close but to differentiate modern welded steels from "modern mono steels" is calling the kettle black in my opinion. Without actually taking real historical smelted bloomery iron and steels, forging them and testing heat treatments, flexibility, edge retention etc there is no proper data collected. The chemical composition of modern steels welded or not are NOT THE SAME AS HISTORICAL STEELS.

I`m very aware of that

when I`m talking about welded steels I don`t mean making composites of modern alloyed steels or simple modern carbon steels but of different types of refined steels. different mainly in carbon and phosphor content and refined in different "stages" of purity to come close to the originals.
one main problem is that every single blade made by such a technique is (and was!!) always an individual item not being 100% comparable to another piece made in the same way.
a friend of mine once said: "making blade replicas is like baking marble cake: you can`t produce 2 which are exactly equal"