Real Steel

In case you haven’t heard, Ernie Gygax recently had a disastrous house fire and lost pretty much all his possessions. All people and pets got out OK. Although we’re friends on Facebook, I’ve never met Ernie in person. But that doesn’t matter. Ernie is a member of our community. Let’s use this project to help

Curious to find out what our master of Real Steel is up to, are you? Then here’s the gist of it: Mjolnir, the Hammer of Thor from Norse mythology, will be created in forged steel, high-quality art prints, and T-shirts. Further, original graphic art will be created using pencil and/or pen and ink by the

The results are in. The kobolds have spoken. The results we have at the end of this post are not what I expected, but kobolds are sneaky and unpredictable by nature. And the winner is…

Real Steel has been around for over two years and 24 installments. Although I’ve done my best to act on suggestions, I haven’t been able to get to them all. In part, this is because I have received so many suggestions, and also because I have the practical matter of Real Steel projects needing to

In honor of the annual destruction and consumption of the dire turkey, we present to you Todd Gdula’s Real Steel, wherein we learn of the creation of a potential weapon that could help with the aforementioned destruction of the dire turkey. The tetsu-ken, or tekkan, is a little-known swordlike weapon from feudal Japan. The originals

In the past, we covered forge welding as it relates to Damascus steel here. But forge welding can be used to stick hot steel together in lots of different ways. San Mai is a Japanese technique now in widespread use in Japanese style and non-Japanese style knives. It translates to “three layers.” Gimme the Steel

The manrikigusari, or 10,000 powers chain, also called the ryofundogusari, or double weighted chain, is yet another obscure Japanese weapon. The story about its origins that I like best is that the samurai who guarded Edo castle were forbidden from spilling blood, and so they set aside their usual weapons in favor of this unusual

Volumes upon volumes have been written about steel chemistry and properties, and which steel is best for a particular job. The kobolds prefer if I keep it to around 500 words (kobolds have short attention spans), so I’ll quickly cover simple carbon steels and low alloy tool steels. Although stainless and high alloy steels have

There are three basic edge geometries used on cutting tools, and those three types have some variations. Each has advantages and disadvantages, and some are useful only on specialized tools. Each type has its advocates, and some makers like one type so much that they specialize in making only that type of edge. The Hollow