 In our previous video, we were able to get ourselves from the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age by smelting raw iron ore we had collected in a bloomery and producing a bloom containing metal iron. This was us at the transitional point in history when iron began to emerge and become the dominant metal, supplanting the previous main metal of choice, bronze. One of the main drivers of change was warfare and the ability to manufacture weapons from a more plentiful ore source. In today's video, we're exploring what that early transitional period might have been like when bronze and iron technologies would inevitably face off against each other in the battlefield. We'll be exploring the unique and different manufacturing methods required for both bronze and iron and then put them to the test against each other. Will one hold the significant advantage of the other? Let's find out. My original goal was to try and make something out of the iron bloom at the end of the video over actually working with the iron bloom proved to be difficult. Only having a vague clue what I was doing, I enlisted some help from some more experienced Blacksmiths to see if I could forge anything out of my iron. Hi, I'm Joe Marcello. I've been a professional sword maker, weapon maker, historical reproducer for the last nine years. I have a lot of various passions, most of them involve metalworking of various sorts. Happy to be here helping, making some how to make everything. I'm Adrian Noland. I'm a bladesmith, not quite as experienced as Joe and I am super pumped to be here helping out making a sword. First off, the spark test to see what is in my bloom. So we'll just go down the row and see how they spark. Anytime we got the sparks on there is showing where the carbon content is. So you've got a pretty low carbon bloom, but there's a little bit of steel kind of hidden in there. So I think once that's all consolidated, you'll have kind of a nice chunk of bloomery iron. The difference between iron and steel wasn't known until later in history, but both compounds are actually alloys of the elements of iron and carbon. The different percentages of carbon are what make a large difference to the properties of the metals and are what separate wrought iron, steel, and cast iron. How are you telling the difference between the iron and the steel? This is a piece of wrought iron and this is a piece of 1080. So the wrought has a little bit of carbon in it. This has .8% carbon. So iron gives you really kind of lazy, fat sparks. Steel, you get a little bit of more of a straw color that kind of sprays. None of this was quite to the high carbon steel level, but there's a couple little sparks in there that told me steel. The bloom looked to be more, much more on the iron side of things. So a couple interesting sparks in there. I'm debating if we want to start hacking some of these apart. Yeah, I'd say crush them up, see if you get some nice hard pieces. Any of the ones that have a lot of ferocity too to see if we can separate them. This looks like iron, right? Yeah, this isn't breaking it off. This chunk looks reasonably easy to just start flattening it out. I'd place it right in on that block of stuff in there. Forge welding is weirdly easy. It's just everything else you need to do, like you're managing a forge, you're watching the temperature. There's a lot involved, but the nature of the process is actually pretty simple. Get it hot, eventually it'll stick together when you hit it hard enough. And it's amazingly gentle. I love forge welding, like the initial welds, just lightly by hand. It's very cathartic. And then you break it to the trip hammer and beat the hell out of it. Until then, it's pretty nice. I'm gonna just very gently try to... So it's supposed to happen? When it crumbles into a mass, it's definitely not, not the easiest to work with. We'll start with that piece. So that's bad. That's good. But out of that chunk, we basically got that usable. So, we're... It's interesting because there's iron in there. It's like that. There we go. Like that. So it was a successful smell that's too small to actually be able to really get anything out of. So I mean like right here, it's a nice little chunk. You have iron, like it's there. It's in a very, very porous stage. Definitely chunks all around that are going to be usable. Getting all of the other stuff removed from it. This one contained a little more. So so far, this is what we're getting of usable material. In a perfect world, you get a much larger, consolidated chunk of iron in your bloom. And so then instead of having to break it apart like this, you can kind of actually just work it down into a single piece. With this, there's so much around it. It definitely worked. It just not efficiently. The other thing I have as a recommendation is you could look up aerostable furnaces. They're little. Like that might be a good option for like redoing this down into a usable bloom to then kind of approach this later. While successful in producing iron, it'll take some extra work in the near future to make it usable. Still wanting to explore the differences in these two historic metals, we substituted my bloom with a comparable piece of iron. But first, let's cast one last Bronze Age sword with the help of Greg, the sword casting guy. For the sword we'll be making, I made a pattern of the now two, one of the most important and longest lasting sword designs. The design lasted for seven centuries, spanning from the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age. I'm back with Greg, the sword casting guy. And previously, we cast a few different swords, including this one out of pennies. We did get a lot of comments that that is a knife and not a sword, but ancient Bronze sword experts get to decide like what's a knife and what's a sword and they've decided if it is longer than a qubit, it's considered a true sword. If it's shorter than a qubit, it's still considered a dagger. What in the world is a qubit? A qubit is the length of your forearm. That's considered a sword kind of just barely, right? Yeah. A lot of the swords were that size because swords were a secondary weapon in the Bronze Age. They were kind of a side piece, second to the spear that they were using. One we're going to be casting today is really on the big side. That would be really pushing the limits of the technology because you imagine hot bronze being poured into this is cooling off the whole time and it has to get all the way to the point before it solidifies and that wouldn't be a certainty with something as long as this. So you'd really have to like master your technique to be able to pull it off. So most Bronze Age swords would be smaller than this, but I'm excited to see if we can do it. So I had to actually make this just for this. Yeah. And you even had to enlarge your box. That's right, kind of Frankenstein it. I'm excited. Good to actually fit. This one is quite a big one. This one is bigger than most swords of this type would have been. It's definitely a sword. Nice shape to it. And it is not like ridiculously heavy. Like for a sword that long, that's doable. That is doable. And you can kind of feel its flexibility a little bit. I mean, bronze is pretty pliable. So in a sword this long, you can imagine in battle, it's going to get bent. Like that'll happen. You'll get some bending it. Now you can harden the edges and you can also harden the middle of it kind of they bend them back and forth sometimes and just like get some of the bending out of the way like a paperclip. It's harder to bend. You're doing that with the sword too. Lastly, to grind and polish off the surface and before getting too far, hammering the hell out of the edges in a process called work hard name, which can greatly increase the strength of the bronze. So what's happening there is you're causing little defects in the crystal structure. And so those defects amount to being harder because you're kind of limiting some of the ways I can bend. As we move firmly from the bronze age to the iron age, this will likely be the last video featuring the help of Greg. If you want to learn more yourself about how to do this historical method of bronze age sword casting, be sure to check out his classes. He travels around the country teaching how to cast swords and he can likely make a trip out to you. Check out his website for more information. And so now we have our first sword made of cast bronze. Bronze was traditionally cast because the bronze alloy has a relatively low melting temperature that makes it feasible to fully melt and pour. Iron however has a much higher melting point in reaching temperatures to cast iron was out of the reach for some time in the iron age. So in contrast to bronze, iron is forged by being repeatedly heated above its recrystallization temperature and manually shaped with a hammer into its desired form. This is similar to some extent to the process of cold working I previously explored with native copper. When surviving to periodically anneal the metal by heating it to above its recrystallization temperature, the iron is just continuously worked while above that temperature. Forging oftentimes produces a stronger result than casting. Let's explore the process in Forge the Second Sword. I will guide you with where I'm striking with my hammer to show you where I want it to be. Unfortunately working on a tight production deadline, we have to speed things up with the help of a modern trip hammer. It's amazing how quick that thing works. Long get that up. That moment between heats where you actually get a chance to like kind of think things through. Yeah I'm crazy. I wear shorts when I'm working. I'm gonna get the length vaguely drawn out then we can work on flaring that out and necking that down. Just want to get it drawn down to something usable. We'll do a little hand hammering just to kind of re-profile everything. Yeah once we start pulling it back work on those fins and the thing. There's certain like refining things you just cannot do with a trip hammer. I need to draw about another inch out then we can start making all the fun shapes happen. It's amazing how much work it goes into a sword. Definitely getting closer. Yeah we can do a little bit of hand forging now and drawing the tip out will be good because then we can get the full length the rest of the way. Exit pass to help flatten out the blade. This section we've hit with the flatter it's taking this undulation out. Yeah it's a little chunky towards the tip still. Give me one strike right there. We're getting close. Only rules donate me in the face. One strike there. One strike there. One strike there. Perfect. We're getting a lot of that weird washboard pattern out. Let's turn it into a sword. It's a beauty of steel. We can kind of just move it around. So I'm excited to get more into steel bronze. You cast it like it either worked or didn't and there's not a whole lot you can do about it. Whereas steel definitely has a little bit more tweaking that you can do in the process for sure. Steel's very fun. I enjoy playing with it a lot. What do you think? Start drawing the fins out? At least draw them a little bit and then draw the rest of the tang out. That fin section is not easy to forge. Definitely easier shape to cast than to forge. That's getting there. So we got that shape started for sure. We will succeed on having made a sword today. Bit of a bend. Nothing too major. Probably from anvil height weirdness. It's just a tiny bit of twist. So right in this nice cherry red heat they can take it and kind of bend it where we want and that's about it. You can definitely see the similarities here. The cross section is just a rectangle. Forge down. What we're gonna do is we're gonna take it and we're gonna convex each side into that shape rather than forging in our bevels and having a flat in the center. A convex edge is going to hold much better at lower content. It'll hold this edge longer. It'll stay a little sharper. Which would have been done with files but we have a belt grinder and that's all there is to it. Rough ground at this point starting to feel like a sword. You can definitely feel that it has an edge now. I mean that is unmistakably a sword. It's weighs just a little bit less than the bronze one I think which is pretty typical for the period of iron swords and see that cross section now it's like a double teardrop. Both sides are sharp so it's just an arc. For something we kind of just whipped out. Yeah. Yeah for one day that's more than I've ever done in a day. Now there are two swords. Lastly just need to halve the two blades. We can try them out. Thanks to Greg we now have the last bronze sword we'll be making in contrast to some of our other swords such as the Mycenaean one we did which is primarily for thrusting and stabbing or the co-pesh which is mostly for slashing. I kind of learned the hard way. It's not great at stabbing all the time. In contrast the Nautu is kind of a general purpose sword and is able to both stab and slash. That kind of allowed it to remain popular through the ages into the Iron Age where they basically just replicated the castings. This one kind of dwarfs all the other ones. It comes at about 23 inches closer to 23 and a half and thanks to Joe and Audrey I have the iron one that was forged. It comes in slightly shorter about 23 inches weight-wise. Once I polished down the bronze one it was actually pretty close. It's only like three or four ounces more than the iron one which is a little bit shorter and a little bit thinner. I had a little trouble forging out the little wings on the handle. It's easy to cast that shape a little bit harder to actually forge it. The bronze one I was able to edge hard out which kind of give it a little bit of a wobbly look after polishing out all the hammer marks and the iron is basically just as it is. Later on other techniques of hardening it through quenching and other methods were discovered that eventually made iron superior to bronze but at this first stage it was probably pretty comparable. So we're going to put that to the test and see how true it is and see how well they fare against cutting and chopping a variety of different objects and then against each other and see what happens when they strike. Gather round children, I will tell you a story of the Great War. Many lives were lost that day. I saw my friend die. He got hit right in the melon. Rumor has it the same enemy has made a new weapon so you guys got to keep your eyes peeled and if they come back you have to avenge me. Yoink! We've got some volunteers here to try out our now twos on so we now have two now twos. Two fruits, two swords. See if there's any noticeable difference and then move on to some harder stuff. Let's see how they compare. He's watching you bro. You're next. I got it in my cup. You got the other one. The real test, coconut. Wish you're this cool. Got a stick. See how well it can chop it. Probably do some damage. We're in the middle here. Pretty sized little cut. It looks like a slight dulling where it hit. But overall, not too much damage. Maybe we should roll on it a couple times. Probably a little bit dull, slightly. But overall, actually pretty impressed. Didn't bend. Still pretty sharp. Pretty good. Got maybe a quarter inch. I think the first hit went the deepest. Pretty good. Let's see what steel does. No noticeable damage. Definitely went a little bit deeper. Got a little bit more penetrating power. Cool. That was less destructive than I thought. Now we're going to do probably the most realistic kind of trial for if someone with a bronze sword faced off against someone with an iron sword, and that's going to be strikes on each other. Back when we did our video with Daman, talked about the co-passion such. He learned some bronze age fighting skills. He talked about how you don't really parry with bronze because it's going to bend. It's going to fold your edges and such. So you're going to try and void as much as possible either by dodging or using a shield. And if you have to, you can use a flat side of it. We're going to do a few experiments of trying to parry with the flat side against a blade. See how well that holds up. And then we'll do blade to blade and see how much damage that does. I have faith in Lauren that she's not going to kill me. We'll see. I don't see a mark on here. Did you do anything to the blade? Oh yeah. I got dull, flattened. Yeah. That's a decent amount of force. I'm impressed. I don't, I don't see, I don't even see a marking. Oh, right there. There's a little bit of bronze in there. Oh wow. Yeah. Barely anything. So it didn't scratch the iron, but left pieces of bronze on it. Wow. So let's trade and try the other way around. That is a gas. Oh, okay. Yep. Anything on that? There's a little bit of bronze on the tip. Did it lose any of the edge? It doesn't look like it. It looks pretty sharp. Wow. That is a lot better than I thought it would. We put a nick in there. I don't even want to look at yours. Bailey knows that we're going to snap their sword. Wow. Yeah. It didn't put the dent in this at all. Really? Yeah. Wow. It really didn't. That's just two hits. Yep. This one's just fine. When it blocked with the flat side, it did put a little bit more of a bend into it. Not nearly as much as this one. Yeah. It's hardly noticeable. That one looks like it's wiggling. Wow. All right. So the end result was not quite expected. I think I read this said that these guys were, should have been pretty comparable. They had a similar penetration and sharpness. Everything we were able to cut through, they did pretty similar with. So it was really when they went up against each other that the main differences came out. This guy is pretty beat up. Some pretty major nicks and bends. And if you were up against an iron sword and they were just wailing on you and you're trying to protect yourself, it would not have been hard for them to just break all the way through your sword and then your toast. If someone with bronze age technology went up against someone with iron technology, it does seem that the iron had a very definitive advantage and could potentially make quick work of anybody with bronze. So welcome to the iron age and thanks for watching. Thank you to all of our supporters on Patreon. Be sure to check out our live stream at 1pm this Saturday and be sure to bring a snack. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. Also, if you've enjoyed these series, consider supporting us on Patreon. We are largely a fan-funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going. Thanks for watching.