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Old 11-17-2011, 06:46 PM   #5
daniel_gudman
 
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Join Date: Sep 2011
Default Re: Why swords are so expensive?

The prices are realistic.

Usually...

Knives are made "negatively", by material reduction, where you take a single piece of metal, and remove bits until you have a knife. The whole piece can be thermally treated with relative ease. Whereas, a sword has to be made "positively", by shaping the whole piece of stock, and cycled through tempering to relax internal stresses that accumulated during shaping.

Anyway if the knife is all the same allotrope of steel that's fine, but a sword has to be more complicated, or it breaks. A sword is three times as expensive because it's three times as much steel, but you're also paying quadruple for a blade that's four times as complicated, too.

For smithing, the difficulty of manufacturing a blade is proportional to it's size.
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