Casting swords in the movies - forging a lie

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one thing that annoys me quite a bit even though granted it does give me material for videos like this is the way in fantasy in medieval films in the scene where they Forge and sword you see it done like this yes it's the casting of the sword in the open-topped mold and you can see the bright orange liquid there going in and slowly slowly creeping along the mold as the music plays and your looks so dramatic and fiery and it is completely wrong I mean it's so wrong it's frankly difficult to know where to start but I shall give it a go so I wish I start the stone mold the stone mold is open-topped how is that going to work how can you cast a 3d item in an open-topped mold yes you'll get the the lower half of the sword so what you can do cast two of them and then sort of glue them back-to-back to make a sword or are you just going to fill it up to the top and so one side of the sword looks like a sword shape and the other side is just a big flat slab that you have to grind down into shape well they didn't grind swords down into shape there had no big grinding machines and you'd be fantastically weighted wasteful of good metal and if you're gonna Forge the sword from that point then why have you cast the sword in the first place surely the whole point of casting a sword is you get the shape of the sword you want in the mold now they did cast swords in bronze yes but not in open top molds and that worked but in these movies that you're not being shown a bronze sword you're being shown an iron sword or I know someone out there is gonna say I think he means steel sword I'm gonna say iron sword do you know what steel is made out of iron they don't cast swords in iron in open top molds for one thing it would come out the wrong shape and another thing is that a big slab of stone here there's always a dramatic big slab of stone isn't it would be terrible for a mold because stone has a very high specific heat capacity if you're in Greece in summer you can still put your hand on a big marble column and immediately it feels icy because the stone is very good at absorbing and conducting heat away from you so your hand feels cold when you touch it so if you pour very slowly oh why always pull pour into the mold so slowly or because its dramatic isn't seeing the mold fill out slowly but actually you want you want to get the methylene quickly you want it flowing into the mold and filling into every little crevice of the mold and then settling in and all air air bubbles whatever coming out of it long before it solidifies you don't want to hang about but if you pour metal slowly into this mold which is going to suck heat out of that metal really quickly then as it goes into the mold it's going to be cooling down and getting more viscous and then the next bit of flowing metal has to then go over the top of that lumpy bit and then that starts to cool down the four more lumps and then maybe the next bits just going to pour sideways over the top of the mold and you'll get a terrible casting no pour it in quickly but also what are you pouring into that mold because that's not iron or steel that is probably Alan menu now why do I say that well because it's glowing orange now film makers like orange because it's a dramatic color isn't it it's the color of fire and stuff but if you heat iron hot enough to pour into a mold it isn't orange it's bright white so as soon as you see that you know that that is not iron but you could say what maybe it's cooled down a bit yeah but the melting point of iron is fifteen hundred and thirty-eight degrees centigrade so it won't be glowing orange because things that glow glow a color according to their temperature it's absolutely irrespective of what material they made out if you look in the inside of a furnace and you see the the bricks there and you see that the coke the fuel that's burning away and you see the the stuff that's being smelted it's all the same shade of orange at the same time because it's all the same temperature doesn't matter what something made out of if it's glowing that shade of orange it's about nine hundred and fifty degrees centigrade so that's considerably lower than the melting point of iron and you have to go quite a bit past the melting point of iron to actually have a get a good cast out of it because otherwise as soon as it hit the mold it would start to cool down and then solidify that's no good you got to get quite a bit past the melting point of iron to make cast iron so that is not iron by and large they use aluminium aluminium melted about 660 degrees centigrade and so that's usually what they use by the way if you ever you see in a film people casting silver and the metal their use looks silvery it isn't silver because silver when it's really hot reacts quite quickly with the atmosphere and forms of some a blackish suit on its on its outside there's no oxidizes it's only when it's cooled and you've buffed it up that it looks silvery whereas molten lead or tin or bismuth or antimony of those ingredients to white metal they look quite silver so by and large if you'll see someone in a movie casting some metal that looks silvery it's not silver so the mold is wrong the metal is wrong but also the whole concept of casting an iron sword is wrong cast iron is brittle now it has very good compressive strength that you you can make an iron pillar out of it and and it'll it'll hold up a roof really well but if you made a sword out of iron a long thin barn you intended to hit hard things part of it it would just shatter it's like glass they did not cast iron swords so in summary then no no and no [Music] the demands you

Info

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 1,232,779

Rating: 4.905376 out of 5

Keywords: Iron (Chemical Element), Ironwork, sword, swords, forge, forging, cast, casting, cast iron, mold, mould, game of thrones, lord of the rings, conan, Conan The Barbarian (Fictional Character), films, movies, hollywood, smith, metalwork, inaccuracy, authenticity, inauthentic, molten

Id: 8E6TzT0eCYs

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 6min 5sec (365 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2015

Reddit Comments

I'm a dumb idiot and I was hoping he would explain how iron swords were correctly made.

👍︎︎ 105 👤︎︎ u/gweeds 📅︎︎ Feb 08 2019 🗫︎ replies

Isn't the sword that's being cast in the GoT scene made of Valyrian Steel?

👍︎︎ 25 👤︎︎ u/krondog4090 📅︎︎ Feb 08 2019 🗫︎ replies

Forged Vs. Cast.

Forged it better. This is why when looking at firearms if you see something was "Cast", avoid it. It's worthless "Pot metal". Always get either "Billet" or "Forged".

👍︎︎ 11 👤︎︎ u/AlphaTangoFoxtrt 📅︎︎ Feb 08 2019 🗫︎ replies

that pun at the end

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/50bmg 📅︎︎ Feb 08 2019 🗫︎ replies

LindyBeige is not making videos to shit on things, he's being educational. From tanks to medieval armor, check out his channel as a whole. He's an international treasure.

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/pfhor 📅︎︎ Feb 09 2019 🗫︎ replies

But it looks cool.

👍︎︎ 26 👤︎︎ u/Urkenelite 📅︎︎ Feb 08 2019 🗫︎ replies

A lot of fantasy kind of mixes both. They cast out a general rough shape and then then some huge guy invariably beats it with a hammer into a sword.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/WingerRules 📅︎︎ Feb 08 2019 🗫︎ replies

Most swords were forged. Some where cast, but generally they were bronze. Some early iron swords where cast, but that because that wast he knowledge and technology of the time, i.e. we cast bronze so we'll do the same with iron.

Similar thing was seen when they started making iron bridges, the methodology was very similar to wood working, because that is how they made bridges.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/LateralLimey 📅︎︎ Feb 08 2019 🗫︎ replies

So I know the term "cast-iron" is used for things, like skillets, so are things like that actually made by pouring molten iron into a mold? it's just that method isn't effective for swords?

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/StretchyPlays 📅︎︎ Feb 08 2019 🗫︎ replies