I mean throughout this twenty minute video there literally are no words spoken.
Instead, we just watch a knifemaker craft a single, beautiful knife from initially forge welding stacks of steel together to testing the finished knife.
Mark Wahlberg apparently needs to step up his forging game.
Today's video has Neil Kamimura looking at forging and blacksmithing scenes from movies and commenting on their authenticity.
Iron Man - RDJ is a heck of an actor, but it's weird that he's banging on cold steel when he's got a hot forge right behind him. And how does steel that's not hot enough to glow actually sizzle in the water?
Rambo - At least the steel's hot here. Sly should use a heavier hammer and hit the center of the anvil. Not a believable scene.
Game of Thrones - Not a good sign that the sword's handle comes off so easily. The container that's melting the sword would have to be hot enough to glow if it's making the sword glow. Surface casting is pretty but isn't how it's really done. They also seem to have broken the law of conservation of mass.
Avengers: Infinity War - At least they used an actual mold not just surface casting. Kinda cool that the two pieces forge welded instantly...that's not s'right.
Infinite - Mark Wahlberg need to hit harder and shouldn't wear a glove on his hammer hand. His sword is all wavy and not done. "Swords do not cut pipe."
LoTR: Return of the King - Flux looks pretty when you smack it. Might as well start from scratch not try to repair the blade. And the elf actors don't know what they're doing.
Conan the Barbarian - Still surface casting with all sorts of pretty flames for the appearance and bad quenching.
A Knight's Tale - Hit it harder, girl.
Ragnarok - Get your metal hotter, gents...and improve your aim.
Apparently the forging scenes in movies are pretty crappy.
I promise you there's a punchline coming in this one, but it takes about 4:50 of set-up to get to the punchline.
What Trent (as previously featured) shows us here is the results of heating borax as a flux in blacksmithing of steel. He shows, initially, what happens when you pour borax straight onto heated steel. The borax bubbles up and doesn't necessarily stick right when it's been poured. Because of that, according to Trent anyway, some blacksmiths will 'cook down' their borax resulting in glassy beads (as previously featured) that can then be pulverized and used as a non-bubbling flux.
I get the feeling that Trent might not exactly see this as a necessary step.
The science of what's happening seems to be pretty straight forward
First off, borax is actually sodium borate (or maybe sodium tetraborate) decahydrate (Na2B4O7·10 H2O) (source).
Initially, the puffing seems to be from a simple loss of the water of hydration (the ·10 H2O part of the formula).
Then the borax seems to decompose into sodium metaborate and boric anhydride through this reaction (source & source).
Na2B4O7 ⟶ 2 NaBO2 + B2O3
This appears to be the same reaction that causes the creation of the borax glass beads.
When the beads pick up colors, one source says that the color comes from the formation of metallic borate compounds such as Co(BO2)2. That's not relevant to this video, though.
Here we just get to have fun seeing Trent rant again.
It doesn't take a whole lot of fancy learnin' and figurin' on the back of an envelope (like Grandpa used to do) to prove that steel softens long before it melts.
We've highlighted the phase diagram of steel, our iron wire demonstration, and even the downfall of the World Trade Center (as the above video references). All three of these posts discus the phase change that takes place around 910C from body-centered cubic (not very workable) to face-centered cubic (far more workable as shown above at 1:45). In the above video, he does the same but using Fahrenheit references.
Theory is all well and good, but proof this succinct and effective is brilliant.
We're going to have to adopt the 'glowing hot rod' drop instead of a mic drop now.
I will warn you that he uses the word retarded at about 0:39. It's not exactly a vulgar word, but it's one that we should probably avoid in our classroom.
One of our campers, Michael Martin, in Salt Lake City was searching for a phase diagram for iron while my co-master teacher explained the glory that is the iron wire demonstration. See, phase diagrams are comfortable and familiar for we few, we happy few, we chemistry teachers.
Luckily, he found a really nice one showing the various allotropes of iron at different temperatures (and at really low pressures.)
Not everybody else looks at a phase diagram as familiar, comfortable territory, but we do, and sometimes it helps to put new information (the crystal changes for iron at increasing temperature) in a familiar form.
