New Casting System For High Tier Weapons And Tools

[TonyLiberatto 364]

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My idea is to have a casting table that would hold a mold specific for the tools or weapon and we would place it side with the crucible. We would heat up the crucible until the metal is liquid and them turn the crucible to pour the metal into the mold.

Once that process is done we can take the molded piece and work it in the anvil.

Understand that high tier metal will not work in a pit kiln and will require the crucible and the anvil, just it needs to be molded before worked in the anvil.

This suggestion includes 2 aspects of smiting. 

First: Instead of putting a mold inside a crucible gui, you would actually pour the metal, in a more realistic way. This would work for ingots or tool heads.

Second: tools need to be molded before they can be worked in the anvil. can you imagine a smith working a ingot into a pickaxe head? It just does not work like that. The tool is molded and them finished in the anvil.

One more aspect that we could add to the process, for swords is the use of double molds, because high tier swords have the center in a soft alloy so the sword bends and the edge uses a hard alloy so is strong and keeps the sharpness.

 

[Darmo 303]

Definitely would love to seem some more involved casting mechanics.  Personally, if allowing casting of higher tier metals I'd kind of like to see it be more complex.  It should kind of be a big step to be able to cast tier 3+ metals, ya?  As an integral part of smithing high tiers weapons and tools, I sort of question it.  I'm not a historian, but I'd argue that it was actually probably most common for your average smith to get - maybe not ingots per se - but generic bar stock.  I would imagine it was most efficient for a foundry to cast their metal in shapes that could be used in many applications.  So long thin bars could be made into straps, blades, spikes, nails, and even flared out to make hoe and axe blades. 

 

Honestly casting is an energy and labor intensive process from what I can tell.  I think it's most efficient when you can do it in huge batches and pour it into very generic shapes that many people can use to make a variety of things.  So I imagine it was pretty common for forge a pickaxe head from a 2 or 3 " square bar.  On the other hand, the game is more about the individual and maybe for an individual without access to a commercial network with foundries producing bar stock, casting small quantities may save some time.  But I guess for me, I'm ok with forging ingots.  It's an approximation to me, of starting with bar stock.

 

As for swords, I keep hearing people talk about this casting of a harder metal over softer.  Where is evidence of that?  I've never heard of that.  Everything I've ever heard is that the hardened layer is from case hardening, or work hardening.  I've never heard of casting a sword or any tool in fact, in two layers.   I ask this in seriousness, as I know you're a historian Tony.

 

Personally I'd have casting in the form of sand casting, and have it be the next metal tech level, used to cast machine parts such as gears, flywheels, engine blocks, piston heads, and other things used in automation.  The sand could be a mixture of regular sand and graphite, and may have a random chance to be "used up", like bowls (to bring an ongoing use for graphite).  I would have the process incorporate wood patterns which the player carves from a plank block using the chisel microblocking.  At least, if that ever makes it into TFC2.    The player must duplicate a required pattern exactly, at which point it pops off as an item - a very laborious process and the primary time-sink.  The player holds this item and right-clicks it on a sand bed, which then changes the sand bed to have the pattern embedded.  They then tamp the sand around the pattern in a mini-game similar to hide scraping.  when done the pattern is removed, leaving an impression (or just a texture representation of an impression, for simplicity sake).  It'd be neat to have a special minecart to put the crucible on.  The player could move the minecart along, and when it's adjacent to a mold, pour it in.  Move it to the next, etc.  The idea being to maximize the use of the heated crucible.  Or they just build the sand pattern next to it, one at a time.  The point being to make it a very involved process, that uses some rare material (graphite).  That and the hand-carving of the patterns (also randomly used up) would make it a labor intensive process, truly the next step in metal working.

[TonyLiberatto 364]

Sand casting sounds like a good idea.

Yes I agree the most medieval smiths wold have thin bars instead of ingots per se. The reason is that it would be much easier to work a horse shoe from such bars and all the small utensils that a smith did at that time, like hinges locks, hooks and so on and so forth.

Is just that when I consider how much metal goes in one pickaxe I doubt they would they would weld several bars together for that and I believe it would be easy for heavy and big tools to be just cast.

Even for basic tools like axe and pickaxe, to have the edges worked in an anvil after casting was a necessity, because if the whole tools was hard it would just be very brittle and break on impact on the first use and if it was soft it would not cut anything.

 

As far as using different metal for center and edge, just read here. the center was iron and even pig iron and the edges were steel.

Sometimes 3 different steel were used for the edges. It was all about the carbon content. 

The Japanese were masters of this Technic,

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_swordsmithing

 

Now understand that I am not proposing anything as complicated as that, similar but simpler Technics were used in Europe for many years. My idea is simple to cast the tools and them work in the anvil.

Ideally we should have sharpening, but this is another discussion.

[Darmo 303]

Well ya, they'd definitely smith layers of different steels together.  That's pattern welding though, not casting.  I thought you were literally suggesting casting a core, and then casting another layer around it.  Which I've never heard of as an irl process for tools or melee weapons.  But ya, pattern welding and case hardening to simulate hardening of work surfaces is a great idea.

 

As for tool casting, so basically you propose having steel visually poured from the crucible into the rough tool casting mold, and then worked on the anvil.  The pouring would be a neat visual step, but proceduraly, it's pretty much the same as the current work flow.  You make the metal, melt it, pour it into a mold, and work the result on the anvil.  The only different is currently you pour them into ingot molds, whereas in this proposal you must use specific tool molds.  To me that illustrates why it's more likely tools were made from generic bar stock - it's much  more adaptable.  Currently an ingot can become any tool.  Very versatile.   But if I have to pour the metal into a specific rough tool mold, then I can only make that tool from it.  So I may find myself needing an axe, but only having available rough castings of picks and chisels.  So now I have to melt down the rough casting and recast it as an axe.   Whereas currently I just heat an ingot up and make whatever I want. 

 

It just seems to me like it makes no real difference mechanically - it's still melt, pour, smith.  And it actually reduces flexibility due to the specific rough castings.    One could argue it's more realistic, but I'd argue it's actually more realistic to have generic stock that can be made into many things.  I think smiths would have in fact used generic bar stock to make pretty much everything.  So even though an ingot isn't a perfect representation of that generic stock, it does make for pretty stacks, and I think it's a serviceable stand-in for bar stock, personally.  you can find a lot of youtube videos of people making things from rough stock.  This video shows some guys make a pick head from apparently a hydraulic piston plunger or something, I'd say maybe 3-4" diameter (skip the first 45 seconds or so).  They use a trip hammer and 3-4 guys, which is probably about required for the metal alloy they're working, which is very hard I think.  They're pretty clearly not experienced in making pickaxes.  But the point is, it's not totally unreasonable I think to make a pick or any tool from an original chunk of metal very different in shape.