[Sca-cooks] OT - Phlip - How would you buy steel?

[Phlip]

Ene bichizh ogsen baina shuu...

> Phlip (or anyone else with an opinion):
> If you were an armorer in the middle ages, how would you acquire the metal
> you worked into your wares?  What quantity/measure would you be working
> with?
> Thanks,
> Christianna
>  'cause, you'd need it to make pots and pans with, yeah, there's the OFC
:)

Pretty much the same as now- by weight. Main difference between now and
then, is that we moderns have a greater choice of shapes and alloys than
they did then. I'd most likely get my metal from either merchants, or, since
my persona is as a travelling smith, from the mines themselves. Also, I'd
recycle almost anything that would come my way. The biblical thang about
beating swords into plowshares is based on reality- broken swords are easy
to convert into sheaths for the cutting edge of a wooden plow.

There's a lot you can do, once you've got refined metal to work with,
understanding that the more you heat it, the more that you lose in scale and
other unreclaimable bits. The goldsmiths DIDN'T suffer as high a percentage
loss, because gold doesn't bond to other substances, including O2, as well,
but steel bonds with O2 very well, along with almost anything else.

If I were a town smith, one of the jobs that I would have done throughout my
apprenticeship, once I got past pumping the bellows, would have been to
shape any stock my master got into usable shapes for his forging, whether
that might be bars, or sheets. At that point, I'd be called a "striker"
because my job would be to swing the hammer and strike the metal in one
spot- the Master would heat and move the metal, so where I hit was the right
spot- or perhaps, a journeyman might.

Keep in mind, that in any of the larger towns, the smiths were very
specialized. Armorers were differentiated from swordsmiths, as well as from
farriers (horseshoers) and from general smiths. General smiths, in a small
town, might do any of these jobs, but generally not as well as a specialist
in a larger town would.

A travelling smith, as my persona is, would go from town to town or fair to
fair, repairing and doing what was needed, but rarely taking a chunk of
metal and making it into something exotic, like a suit of armor or a sword.
Instead, I'd be there mostly for repairs, and for homely items, if the
people could afford them- latches, possibly something to hold a pot swinging
over a fire, maybe buckles and the like.

Tinkers would go from town to town and specialize in things like pots and
pans, not necessarily made from iron. They'd do more with copper and tin,
which I'd be very unlikely to want to mess with- those metals will "poison"
a fire, so you can't weld in it.

Does this help any?

Saint Phlip,
CoD

"When in doubt, heat it up and hit it with a hammer."
 Blacksmith's credo.

 If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is probably not a
cat.

Never a horse that cain't be rode,
And never a rider who cain't be throwed....