The Factory Floor

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Journeyman Geek

00:39

@Green What is the weight of a fully laden swallow?

2 hours later…

Shalvenay

02:38

@Green I do have a next question, come to think of it (I've batted it around as an idea for the site but am not sure how to frame it). Lets say a ten-thousand-elf army got dropped somewhere on the face of this planet, with just the clothes on their backs + a quartermaster who has some sort of magical purse at their disposal (so they aren't exactly completely broke). They have no problem paying for food as a result, and can acquire ranged weaponry without too much difficulty even...

...but the elves consider it a disgrace and an indignity for a warrior to to be bereft of their sword, so their quartermaster needs to solve *that* problem as well. Requirements:
* needs to be a fully functional sword, not a sword-shaped object (take and hold an edge, not break under foreseeable use and abuse, full tang hilt, at least a basic quillion/crossguard, properly balanced for battle)
* needs to be large enough to let an elven warrior wield it properly (75cm to 1m straight blade, double edged)

How could a modern contract forge get these elves swords that are as tough and sharp as possible in a mass production environment, given the need to produce these at what's essentially a wartime-production cost? (i.e. what alloys and processes would our hypothetical contractor use?)

Green

03:04

@Shalvenay So, we need 20K high quality, fit-for-fighting quality swords in as small a window as possible. Money isn't an issue because bottomless money bag. We just need them as quick as possible.

Shalvenay

@Green yeah, money's not an issue within reason, and we can go with 20k elves instead of 10k if you'd rather (one sword per elf + a small number of spares I suppose)

Green

I was going with a double safety margin of 2 swords per elf.

Shalvenay

@Green yeah, well, either way, it's a mass-production quantity

Green

03:42

Okay. 20k swords divided by 365 days is 54 years, or 54 guys working every day for a year. Double the number of guys, it's down to 6 months. 200 ironworkers could get the whole thing done in 100 days (assuming one sword a day per guy).

Getting the right steel together shouldn't be difficult since modern steel production is in the megaton range.

Shalvenay

@Green assuming we're talking about a modern contract forge (i.e. the kind of shop that would take a contract to forge a bunch of say...engine crankshafts), would they be able to do better with their mass-production machinery?

Green

We are probably looking at several different producers. One manufacturer is going to be well suited for cutting the blanks for the swords from stock. Grinding down and polishing the blade to final geometry would be someone else. Perhaps the second stage also handles all the pomels and cross-bars. Still another manufactuer assembles all the blades into a final product.

Shalvenay

@Green yeah, from a production-line standpoint that could make some sense

Green

@Shalvenay I think so. With an order size of 20K, it's worth the speed increases and tooling setup to bring in CNC grinding/milling. If you can cut a blank with a CNC plasmas cutter/water jet in <1 minute then give it to a CNC grinder to rough out the final geometry in 20 minutes, you'd probably spend more time moving the metal around on the shop floor. C

Heat treatment can be done in batches of hundreds or thousands.

Shalvenay

@Green yeah, CNC machinery and/or modern industrial forging (because there are good metallurgical reasons for forging to still be a thing, and modern industry forges far larger parts on the regular -- the crankshaft of an EMD 12V710 diesel engine is a single forging AFAIK)

Green

03:55

@Shalvenay Agreed. The big problems as I see it would be: quality control on the various parts, sequencing of manufactuering, delays to final assembly.

Building the pipeline through the various manufacturers would take some time to setup (months?) but once that "machine" is set up, swords delivery could be churned out quite quickly.

There's a bunch of specifics I can't get you here. Lead-times, which alloy to use for which part, manufacturing process, limits of forge/stamped blades, heat treating....I know that these are question but no idea how to answer them.

Shalvenay

@Green yeah, I'm more curious as to the selection of alloy + heat-treatment processes myself since those would be the big quality determiners more than the machining/sharpening

just not sure how to frame a mainsite question to point to those as the main questions vs. the process stuff you mentioned

Green

@Shalvenay If there's a metalurgy stack exchange, I'd ask around over there to see which are the commonly recommended stell alloys for modern sword making. (Given all the pretension for sword making, I'd be more surprised if that question hadn't been asked three or four different ways.) Pretty sure it's not common mild-steel.

Shalvenay

@Green yeah, my lean (given that we aren't going all out on materials) would either to be a standard high carbon steel (10xx) or "ordnance steel" (4150? although 4130 and 4140 could be serviceable in this application as well)

Green

@Shalvenay Sounds like you've done some research already.

Shalvenay

@Green yeah, I'm familiar with things on background but not super into it either. the other big one is heat-treatment, but that interplays strongly with alloy selection. (my personal thoughts would be to use something that works well with a salt bath austempering process because that'll get you the best toughness for a given HRC but there may be other metallurgy tricks that might be better for swordsmithing, I dunno)

Green

04:07

@Shalvenay If the quartermaster has time, he would be well served to find a current domain expert on how to make great swords. If the Elves are most comfortable with Western-style swords, find an expert in Europe. Look to Japan for Eastern-style swords. That expert would be able to give you trade-offs for various alloys, costs and manufactuering requirements.

Each elf warrior is ging to know what a good sword feels like in their hand but not a dang thing about how to actually make one.

Humans over the last 5 millenia have been wildly inventive with sword geometries. Historians have spent man-millenia going over the fine details about which swords worked best in which environment.

Shalvenay

@Green yeah, the thing I find is that a lot of the folks who are focused on swordmaking as a craft are focused on keeping it squarely within the parameters of craft blacksmithing

Green

Another thing to consider is that swords the elves are used to aren't actually the swords they need for the current conflict.

Shalvenay

(this strikes mostly in heat treating -- very few folks even attempt austempering in the craft-forge environment despite the process being well-documented and the materials needed relatively readily available nowadays)

Green

@Shalvenay True, but there's going to be that one guy who has forging in his veins. He will have a really good handle on craft blacksmith but also on modern mass-production. Bridging the gap would be relatively easy for that guy.

Shalvenay

@Green yeah, there are a few tinkers out there on knife forums who have tried austempering-type processes to seemingly very good end

14 hours later…