Titanium Sword / Katana?

It's just the mercury poisoning :[ Takes a lot of fish eatin' to get this kid of ppb.
 
3v would be poor choice for sword makers. making swords you talking about 30~40inches of blade heat treated and polished to a fine finish. 3v will taking a lot more time to finish than low alloy steel such as 9260. steel like 5160, 9260, s7 lacks the wear resistance of 3v. but it offers similar hardness and higher toughness which is more important for sword to handle violent cut and impact.
 
hammerfall said:
3v would be poor choice for sword makers. making swords you talking about 30~40inches of blade heat treated and polished to a fine finish. 3v will taking a lot more time to finish than low alloy steel such as 9260. steel like 5160, 9260, s7 lacks the wear resistance of 3v. but it offers similar hardness and higher toughness which is more important for sword to handle violent cut and impact.
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:confused:
Hammerfall, Have you made or used a 3V sword?

Dan
 
I actually get the argument from a production standpoint, but not for custom makers. But then again, pretty much all production katanas are made in China, and I doubt CPM-3V will be shipped over there.
 
Mecha is out there, he's hitting the shows..would someone just go and HANDLE one of these? I'm dying to know how they feel. How many of us are going "blade to blade" with a $900 sword anyways? Maybe cutting cardboard tubes, tatami, and melons, etc, but i can't see that hurting these titaniums much. I'd bet the lightness would make these wonderful to just practice some forms with..if you're currently even fair with your style of choice imagine filming yourself with the speed increase..
 
Kaotikross!

There were people at the knife show who said they were reading this forum thread, and they handled them, but they haven't said anything. :[ The person who started this thread in the first place did come and visit my shop a couple weeks after he posted it, but has flaked on coming by again to see the latest stuff, and never wrote a response to this thread. Now I'm down to the two time-lapse swords left (and a couple beaters and the wakizashi)! A few folks out there in the world own my hammer-forged grade 5 "stairwell defender" swords, and a handful more have knives. There are a lot of people around my workshop who have seen the whole circus, including drunkenly hacking up whatever is handy with the swords: wood, plastic car ramps, garbage cans. Quality control, ya know!
 
I was at the Eugene show and got the handle some of Mecha's work. Very cool stuff.

Their weight was truly amazing. Far lighter than they look. I have not handled very many swords, so I can't really comment much on how they handled with regard to balance. The flex demonstration was also impressive.

I think it would be nice to see some slightly longer models. It would be interesting to see how they compare to larger steel swords.
 
Love the video. I really need to get one of those to do some testing with myself. They look like fantastic up close blades, very maneuverable, lightweight yet still durable.
 
Yeah, the impromptu flex testing made me wince too.
It would be really embarrassing in the ER to have to explain skewering yourself with a sword. :D
 
Mecha, had a question for you. It always bugs me when I listen to that David Guetta song about titanium, since I was under the impression that it's not actually bulletproof. I assume with enough of it, it would stop a bullet, but do you think it can be heat treated to be effective body armor like steel, or does it not have enough tensile or other strength?
 
Titanium-alloys ARE used in vehicle and aircraft armor where weight and corrosion-resistance is most important, but they're not as effective as the top-tier armor steels, especially against fast-moving rifle bullets (not to mention molybdenium-steel-cored AP rounds). Even in per weight basis, titanium is only slightly better than the modern advanced bainite-carbide steels, but much more expensive. Against most pistol-calibers you'll be fine with a hardened titanium armor of reasonable thickness but then again you'd be better of with a flexible, cheap and ligthweight kevlar or UDHPE-vest.

...Assuming you ARE talking about bullet- and not stab-proofing. Against stabs I can imagine it only has to be marginally thicker than steels to give the same strength, and not of the highest-grade alloys. Plain fiber-vests barely help against stabs at all. IIRC the yield-curves of titanium is similar to steels in that there is a fairly large plastic region after failure, so it wouldn't crack the plate and therefore wedge any blade or point to a halt pretty quickly, even after partial penetration.

So against stabs: Possibly. Against guns: Hell no.
 
I mean, really most anything is effective in stopping bullets at sufficient quantities. But it takes something like 14mm of Ti to stop a rifle bullet, because it cannot be hardened enough to properly deform a bullet, from what I understand.

If Mecha's got it down enough to make blades out of it, however, he might be able to make a Ti level III plate. I'd be really curious if that's possible.
 
That's a great question Mr. Falcon!

I was under the impression that a titanium plate was one of the best trauma inserts one could use in a ballistic vest. I haven't looked into it very far... though I've already been tempted to shoot one of my failed sword blades with various caliber rounds to see what happens.

The Soviets used titanium plates over their bulletproof vests, seems to be around 6 mm thickness over kevlar, I have seen the plates way thinner and thicker though. They are often for sale individually on ebay from scrappers in Slovakia and are cheap enough to do some test shots on.

When it comes to vehicle armor: The pilot armor in the A-10 Warthog is a titanium tub, because the plane was designed to be as tough and bullet-resistant as possible, and cost was not an object. I think that the high cost of titanium alloys and also the high cost of fabricating it are the only reasons it isn't used to armor all military vehicles. Which makes me want a titanium Willy's Jeep!

This link has some good information:

http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/9705/montgomery-9705.html
 
Do it! I couldn't find much of anything that was a straight Ti armor plate. There's Titanium steel which appears not to be Ti at all, but very few if any straight Ti outside of vehicles. Nothing in the 3-4mm range that's common for steel armor plates.
 
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