Forging the Dragonslayer sets the bar for übergeeks:
To an outsider, the booths at the Materials Solutions show quickly blur into an endless procession of valve trains, high-temp thermometers, and notices for the Thermal Spray Society.Then there’s the booth for QuesTek Innovations. Alongside the glossy logo, against a black cloth, hang two bloodthirsty blades: a 7th-century Viking broadsword and a foot-long Danish knife called a seax – the sort of weapon that the legendary Geat hero Beowulf used to dispatch his final foe. The seax is clamped onto a chem-lab ring stand, poised above a third blade: a modern Japanese hunting knife that has a sharp, quarter-inch chunk cut out of its edge. The eyes of many a bored salesman light up at the sight of this cutlery.
The broadsword and the seax are replicas of medieval originals. Chinese hands fabricated the broadsword, which Greg Olson, the blond, 53-year-old Northwestern University professor who serves as QuesTek’s chief science officer, bought online for a couple hundred bucks. But Olson enlisted Richard Furrer, an old-school bladesmith in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, to forge the seax, and Furrer didn’t skimp on authenticity. Olson points out that the handle is made of oosic, which is a polite way to say mineralized walrus penis: “Apparently, it doesn’t get slippery when it’s covered with blood.”
Walrus penis is intriguing enough, but it’s the seax blade that makes Olson grin. The material is Ferrium C69, the hardest of three fancy steel alloys that QuesTek has brought to market. Costlier than most other steels (it runs roughly $10 per pound), C69 is a breakthrough material, offering up to 50 percent greater hardness than rival alloys with similar carbon content.
But what really sets QuesTek’s materials apart is their genesis. Unlike the vast majority of new steels, which are developed by cooking up prototype materials and testing them repeatedly in the lab, QuesTek’s steels were designed entirely on computers. Employing what he calls a systems design approach, Olson and his students at Northwestern use sophisticated thermodynamic models of metal transformations to mix and match the alloys and heat treatments they need to produce the strength, hardness, and flexibility they’re looking for.
“The whole strategy is to get there by design,” Olson says. “Instead of experimenting until you find something, you completely create it beforehand at the workstation. Then you test it and see if it’s true. So far, our models have proven true.”
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As it turns out, the Nordic blade is just a stand-in for a mightier sword to come, because this year Greg Olson and QuesTek are planning to use their Ferrium C69 to forge the hardest sword in history.The Japanese hunting knife on display got the gash in its cutting edge from a Ferrium C69 knife fabricated last spring by a group of students in Olson’s Engineering, Design, and Communication course. In contrast to the seax, which was forged with a hammer and anvil, the Ferrium C69 blade was machine-cut, then “case hardened,” which involved returning the piece to high temperature after it was shaped to diffuse more carbon into its outer surface. This carburization process gave the knife a superhard edge while keeping its core soft enough to prevent brittleness, the Achilles’ heel of hard steels.
After quenching the C69 blade in oil and tempering it again at 900 degrees Fahrenheit, the students clamped their blade and the Japanese knife to a Sintech testing machine, their two edges facing each other. Slowly, the machine pressed the knives together. Although the C69 blade chipped slightly, it proved victorious, slicing a quarter inch into the Japanese knife.
Olson had his students go to all this trouble because he wants to prove that his sword could, in theory, chop through a Japanese katana blade. Katanas were magnificent medieval weapons used by samurais; today, they are invested with great, almost mystical value by the collectors to whom Olson will market his broadsword. That’s partly why the students chose a Japanese hunting knife for the demo. The blade – made by MAC Corporation of Seki, Japan, a region famous for its katanas – also had the right muscle: On the Rockwell hardness scale used by metallurgists to test their wares, it ranked just shy of the C60 rating for katanas. In contrast, the carburized tip of the C69 blade was, as you might guess, nearly C69.
Olson is confident that his QuesTek broadsword will be able to cut into a samurai blade. But the professor wants more from his weapon: He wants to make a blade that could – hypothetically, of course – destroy one of the greatest supernatural beasts in Western lore. He wants to forge a Dragonslayer.
Cultures all over the world carry dragons in their myths – in China, the bearded, snaky monsters are even said to bring good fortune. But when you think of dragons and swords, you envision blond warriors battling foul, fire-breathing lizards over hoards of treasure. The time is usually the so-called Dark Ages, when Germanic tribes cavorted around Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire. When their bards weren’t chanting legends of Sigurd the Dragonslayer, these tribes produced some of Europe’s first dependably powerful swords. Before then, iron blades were so flimsy that they often had to be bent back to shape in mid-battle. In addition to gaining more control over carbon infusion and quenching, the Germanic smiths perfected pattern welding – a process of folding and twisting different steels together that not only purifies and strengthens the metal but also graces the blade with gorgeous, snaky patterns that resemble monochromatic marble paper.
After his students conducted surveys of bladesmiths and sword collectors to help him determine the final design of the Dragonslayer, Olson settled on a pattern-welded, double-edged early medieval broadsword with a one-handed grip. To nail down the performance specs, Olson enlisted Michael Drout, then a doctoral student in medieval literature at Loyola University. Focusing mostly on the V?lsung saga (a source of Wagner’s Ring cycle) and the Beowulf legend, Drout figured that, in addition to the phenomenal strength necessary to penetrate a dragon’s thick hide, the blade would need to have a high thermal tolerance in order to withstand fiery breath. And dragon blood is intensely acidic, which means that you’d want the corrosion resistance offered by high-chromium steel. Surveys of sword collectors also indicated that the juju (and auction price) of the blade would soar if at least some of the base iron in the alloy came from meteorites, the “sky metal” that supposedly lent King Arthur’s sword Excalibur its magical properties.
Interestingly, QuesTek‘s site makes no mention of their Dragonslayer sword.