Astronomy / Space Can you forge a meteorite

Winterwalker

Winterwalker
I've become addicted to Forged In Fire on the History Channel; A competition where smiths compete in a kind of masterchef contest, you get an insight into both metals and how they're worked. Searching that on YouTube this afternoon, I stumbled on Alec Steele's channel, a young UK blacksmith, he's challenging himself to make all sorts of things and has tried to hot work ... a 5 billion year old meteorite.

Hopefully interesting; gives some insight into meteorites, how they might be formed in space or what you might find if you picked one up in ED ... and smacked it repeatedly with a hammer.

[video=youtube;Yr_5tIPP3dM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr_5tIPP3dM[/video]

[video=youtube;7-QWol38NA0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-QWol38NA0[/video]
 
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Winterwalker

Winterwalker
mp4x said:
I can't see your videos because I'm firewalled, but did you know Tutankhamen had a blade made from meteorite? 3000+ year old meteor-dagger! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/01/tutankhamuns-blade-made-from-meteorite-study-reveals/ https://eos.org/articles/pharaohs-iron-dagger-made-from-a-meteorite-study-confirms
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Incredible .. and an amazing thought. The problem being the meteorite isn't an alloy but an amalgum of conglomerated lumps of this and that, clumped together and only partially welded together. The minute you try to work it, the metals delaminate.

There are one or two people who have made such things with modern forging hammers but this one for example took three months with one of those. Doing that in ancient Egypt, by hand hammer only, would take a lot of patient and careful work, achieving something you can't easily do any other way with materials of different melt temperatures.

After all that though, any superstitious enemy meeting a king with a sword that literally fell from the sky, would be you'd think pretty intimidated! Well worth the effort for conquerin' .. with the gods as your ally.

I certainly remember in engineering class 101 that one prized way of quenching the steel was to run it through a slave, whose body temp was perfect for the producing a hard edge while keeping the blade a little ductile too, and not too brittle to snap. Urban legend maybe but ...
 
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mp4x

mp4x
Winterwalker said:
Doing that in ancient Egypt, by hand hammer only, would take a lot of patient and careful work, achieving something you can't easily do any other way with materials of different melt temperatures.
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Well, these are the people who built the great pyramids, so if anyone could do it :)
 

Morbad

Morbad
mp4x said:
Well, these are the people who built the great pyramids, so if anyone could do it :)
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That the ancient Egyptians worked meteorites isn't a credit to their technical capabilities, quite the opposite really. Most iron tools/weapons made by societies that couldn't make fires hot enough to smelt iron were from meteorites.

Inuits (though they likely had access to extremely rare native telluric iron deposits as well), Aztecs, and quite a few societies that were otherwise pre-metal made weapons and tools from meteorites, because it was a hell of a lot easier to work a good nickel-iron meteorite than to smelt iron or even stumble upon bronze.

Winterwalker said:
I suppose it wouldn't matter much if the same material is melted down and cast in a mold .. but does forging somehow retain something deeper, of the original, by part preserving the crystals too? (Just musing to myself)
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The metal would have been vastly superior in quality if they could have melted it.

They didn't know how to make fires that hot, which is the whole reason they needed the meteorites for iron in the first place.
 
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Winterwalker

Winterwalker
Raino said:
the "real ancient" japanese katanas have a heart from meteorite steel
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That's interesting because as far as I've always understood - when making katana's, possibly more recently in history - the harder (folded) steel is placed on two sides and at the bottom of a more ductile, soft steel core made to absorb shock. Whether the meteorite gives you that ductility, contains elements that add to that (and how on earth any year BC smith would know) or in other words the meteorite gave a real structural advantage or whether it was a purely spiritual choice, any idea?

The spiritual;
[video=youtube;PECjy42xRzU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PECjy42xRzU[/video]

The physical. Surely the biggest problem in using meteorites for any practical purpose is that no two are likely to be the same?
[video=youtube;rEask9M1uXk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEask9M1uXk[/video]
 

Raino

Raino
i think this refers more earlier, as i marked OPs post

they been able to melt iron, but not to make steel

real ancient so
 
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