Kajiya de Hajimeru Isekai Slow Life - Vol. 6 Ch. 26

[finalm]

Not a Blacksmith myself by any means, but it seems their Order of Operations is something like this:
Liquify Metal (presumably steel) > Cast Sword Blank > Hammer and Refine Blank into Usable Blade > Sharpen and Finalize Blade, Cross guard and Scabbard.

Is casting a steel blade bad? Yes, as a molten metal, steel is not as fluid as iron and nowhere near the level of bronze or copper. They can use the hammering step above as a means of taking cast steel and Magic BS them into usable blades that will probably be better than anything any other blacksmith could make?

Yeah, in a nutshell that is the process. You could cast steel, though medieval furnaces wouldn't have the temperatures required to melt it entirely (nor for iron, if we're being pedantic). It's a bad idea, though. The resulting blade would be brittle.

 

[G4ost]

Thanks for keeping up with this one. Its one of my most relaxing reads

 

[Justking14]

He might probably get attacked cuz if he just watch it might be boring, but hey i'm not sure

That is the other possibility, though that should be less likely since he’ll be in the way, way back repairing swords. In general, it’s not a good idea to put your blacksmith in harms way since most of them can‘t actually fight.

 

[BoredTears]

Also, is it just me, or are do MC's cast swords also include crossguard and hilt in the casting? Typically, when a sword is being forged, you don't include the crossguard until after the blade is forged, yet Rike is seen hammering a sword that already has a crossguard on it and MC is seen sticking a sword with a crossguard on it into the forge itself.

Wouldn't that make the swords way heavier than necessary?

Integral crossguards aren't really a weight problem, other than it taking more effort to balance the weight later when you can't just replace it with a guard of a different weight. It's not like they have to weigh more than a normal crossguard. They just get in the way during forging and handle construction. Part of that isn't really a problem for them with their setup. Because historically it was more common for a smith to only produce the sword blade, while the guard, hilt, and everything else was produced by other people. As their shop handles all of that the crossguard isn't going to get in the way of the rest of their work, and these are all made to be the same, so they only have to figure out balancing for one of them and then replicate it.

One problem with integral crossguards is that if the crossguard breaks, it could crack into the blade ruining the sword. As where a normal crossguard will just break off and need to be replaced, but leaving the blade itself unharmed. Also that if it breaks it would be more difficult to replace, as you will have to file off the remaining material. Though an integral crossguard should be sturdier.

Probably just the artist not thinking through the entire proccess though.

 

[HaikenEdge]

Probably just the artist not thinking through the entire proccess though.

Or just being ignorant about smithing despite having a fetish for it.

 

[Shinigamisama]

Samia knows something else is going on.

 

[BanzaiYuri]

I feel like its gonn be a very boring ten days since his swords don't break. It'd honestly be hilarious if he's just sitting and waiting the entire time

Just that django unchained leo laughing meme when all 50 soldiers come to him at the end of the expedition wondering why none of their swords got damaged XD

 

[joeymcclane]

I feel like its gonn be a very boring ten days since his swords don't break. It'd honestly be hilarious if he's just sitting and waiting the entire time

No his top quality swords are wear proof... Not the production quality ones he is providing here. They chip and damage.

I don't remember if the manga explained it properly. IIRC He creates 3 tiers of weapon quality: normal, special and legendary grade.
Sourse: the LN.

 

[Justking14]

Just that django unchained leo laughing meme when all 50 soldiers come to him at the end of the expedition wondering why none of their swords got damaged XD

Either that or they‘ll refuse to pay him because he didn’t do any work

 

[theldras]

right, i forgot the author is a idiot who dont know how to google things like swordsmithing, you dont cast iron or steel medieval weapons, you forge them, casting will only serve to make them useless brittle wallhangers, hell, even today we still forge most things made out of iron and steel, what we dont forge we roll and stamp out instead, few steel things we produce is cast, mainly and almost exclusively used for larke solid and complex pieces, like pipes and other shapes and very large sized objects that would be very had if not impossible to forge.

 

[theShear]

No his top quality swords are wear proof... Not the production quality ones he is providing here. They chip and damage.

I don't remember if the manga explained it properly. IIRC He creates 3 tiers of weapon quality: normal, special and legendary grade.
Sourse: the LN.

Yep, they mention it in the manga when he first decided to sell stuff after experimenting to get a "Sellable" level of sharpness.

 

[Nixeu]

That's likely part of it. I think as a writerly question, it's a choice of how much technical jargon to include. Less than a research paper for sure, but how much less? This author has written close to zero, and that means they don't need to know anything about metallurgy specific to swordsmithing. They could have chosen to include as much as they could get with a few hours of research. But- that means more jargon in the story.

It's a value call, like the difference between hard and soft sc-fi.

As an SF fan, I think this comparison has a lot of flaws. In the case of SF, you're talking about achieving things that are impossible with our current technology. How much the author wants to go into the details and risk being either proven wrong as science progresses, or simply hand-wave to focus on other topics, is indeed a matter of trying to pick what fits your story best.

In this case, though, this manga is supposed to be about swordsmithing, which is not some unknown topic like in SF. We know how swordsmithing works. And the author is outright using techniques that a quick Google search would tell him are wrong. You don't cast steel swords (casting steel being incredibly tricky even for basic machine parts), nor do you make swords out of cast iron (too soft and too brittle). He's not alone in making that mistake, to be fair; Peter Jackson has orcs casting swords in his LotR films. And he got roasted by those who know anything about swordmaking for it, too. But at least Jackson wasn't making an entire film about sword making. If you're going to write a manga about something, basic research is the bare minimum.

Worse still, this is a fantasy setting. The author could easily have avoided this issue by either using magic in the process, or using some fantasy alloy instead of steel. They didn't. Which means they're probably totally and willfully ignorant about the topic they're focusing on writing about.

 

[Kreceir]

I have been binge reading these 26 chapters and I'm loving this manga! And the waifus in the harem are all cute!

But I have noticed something since most isekai stories tend to do this...
The MC didn't make soy sauce or even ever thought about making it.
Hell, the most 'Japanese' thing he has done so far was to put up a small shrine and praying to it and doing the Itadakimasu.
And ofcourse forging a Katana counts but those swords already existed in this world.

Its such a stupid thing that I can't help but notice it lmao.

 

[Ultimaniac]

I'm confused. Why are they making molds for the swords? Are they made of bronze or something? I was sure he was using iron/steel for his blades, which should be forged, not cast, if you want them to be more than sword shaped pieces of garbage.

I guess if you've go overpowered magic smithing skills, you get to also skip doing things properly (cough*like doing some really basic research on how to weaponsmith*cough).

The actual blacksmithing has been inaccurate since the beginning. They were quenching swords that already had the handle and guards on them in the earliest chapters.