08-11-2011, 04:32 PM
There are a few wrong notions floating around.
First Steel vs Iron, while steel does indeed contain Carbon it must contain between 0.2 and 2.1% anything above that and were talking about cast iron which is brittle. The main problem dealing with "steel" is having the right conditions. Heating iron on top of coals will add to the carbon content making cast iron... That's why you'd need a smelting and pouring structure.
Steel has a crystaline structure that changes with temperature and there are structures which are more resilient than others so after heating the metal to the desired structure you need to "lock it" that is called tempering the metal, which can be done by dipping it into water, heated oil or a salt bath. Volumes are written about the multiple variations possible, I'm in no way an expert in archeometallurgy but from all I gather there were regions where you produced better steel, due to local factor such as alloy elements in the mineral itself, alloy elements in the temper water/salts/oils or "blessing" the plates by buring them in the ground (which allowed the lower carbon metal to become corroded and then joining several resulting plate together).
I fear that I'm already boring you...
So cold rolling steel was possible, but like the steel manufacture itself it would probably be a local thing.
Regaring ratched gear on Balistas an Onagers, SOME had ratched gears (including reducing gears), but most tension groups (modioli) did not have ratchets at all.
First Steel vs Iron, while steel does indeed contain Carbon it must contain between 0.2 and 2.1% anything above that and were talking about cast iron which is brittle. The main problem dealing with "steel" is having the right conditions. Heating iron on top of coals will add to the carbon content making cast iron... That's why you'd need a smelting and pouring structure.
Steel has a crystaline structure that changes with temperature and there are structures which are more resilient than others so after heating the metal to the desired structure you need to "lock it" that is called tempering the metal, which can be done by dipping it into water, heated oil or a salt bath. Volumes are written about the multiple variations possible, I'm in no way an expert in archeometallurgy but from all I gather there were regions where you produced better steel, due to local factor such as alloy elements in the mineral itself, alloy elements in the temper water/salts/oils or "blessing" the plates by buring them in the ground (which allowed the lower carbon metal to become corroded and then joining several resulting plate together).
I fear that I'm already boring you...
So cold rolling steel was possible, but like the steel manufacture itself it would probably be a local thing.
Regaring ratched gear on Balistas an Onagers, SOME had ratched gears (including reducing gears), but most tension groups (modioli) did not have ratchets at all.
