Why Bronze is Fascinating...

Alright friends, today I want to talk a little more about Brahms and why he is

fascinating

, if you are not fascinated, maybe it is simply because you do not know enough about him yet, so this of course has a special place because it is the first metal in history. history that had widespread use for weapons and armor, now copper was used for quite a while before that and was also used for tools and some weapons, but

bronze

actually allowed for metal armor in ways that copper did not and became iconic . The great Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations of ancient times were largely built on

bronze

and the Bronze Age lasted a long time, about 2000 years, if you look at the earliest beginnings in areas like the Aegean and the Levant for example, it depends from where you look.

Some places in Europe like Britain, for example, entered the Bronze Age much later, as did Scandinavia. People sometimes overestimate how soft bronze is, of course it is much softer than steel, but so is iron, even mild steel compared to high carbon steel, but it cannot be hardened. the bronze. I'll talk more about that later and that makes it significantly more useful, but iron is easier to acquire because you only need one material for bronze, you need copper and Tim, copper is pretty easy to find, tin not so much. People have to engage in long-distance trade to acquire tin to make bronze and it is still used today, for example, for bearings due to the low friction that bronze has with other metals and also its low load capacity. , also used for tools. in environments that have a high risk of explosion because bronze hammers, for example, do not create sparks when you hit other metals, making them safe from volatile gases and fire risks, etc. and of course it is also used for sculptures and jewelry, speaking of jewelry, I have the perfect sponsor for today's video.

The folks at Viking Jewelry sent me this cool ring here and I didn't expect it to be so well made. I mean, it sounds a little bad, but what I mean is that it looked really good in it. picture, but when I bought it I was very impressed with how detailed it is, it is a very complex mold, super clean, it is extremely soft inside, very comfortable, they are made in Ukraine, yes, they come in this nice box here, even with a stamp waxy. Note, I haven't broken the wax seal yet, pretty girl, we hope this vague visa ring fits you perfectly and guides you on your path to life.

It's an honor, we are extremely proud that you wear it with everything, with everything. our best feelings, sincerely, Alice Loic Morita, rightly and the Viking team, is fantastic. I really appreciate it, thank you guys so much and I thought it would fit really well in this video because it illustrates one of the things that I really like about bronze and that is how pretty it is, let me see it's beautiful, right? I generally don't like wearing jewelry much, but I might start now because I really like this ring, it's very well made and something about big rings, so vague VCO, by the way, is a symbol that appears in the 19th century hooded manuscript, It's technically unclear if it was already used during the Viking Age, but you know it fits within the overall Viking art style.

Vague VCR translates to something that shows the way, so it's a magical sign that's supposed to help you orient yourself and get through storms and bad weather, etc., so they also provided two codes that will be linked below, one gives you 30% off this ring and the other one gives you 20% off everything else in the store, so I can definitely get behind this jewelry and, you know, bronze jewelry in general has always made me liked. Now I really prefer them to the silver ones because just because of the color it's a really attractive type of dark earthy color, so to speak, it has one disadvantage over silver and that is that over time it can tarnish and develop a sort of greenish color and also it can stain your fingers and turn them black or green, but you can seal it by covering it with something like protecting a clear for example, or even just clear nail polish, that's definitely something I would recommend talking about discoloration and corrosion.

Copper and copper alloys such as bronze generally corrode at a slower rate than iron. Bronze tends to develop quickly. a patina which is copper oxide that acts as a protective layer and then often all you get is surface corrosion, it doesn't deeply corrode the material like rust does on iron, although there is a thing called bronze disease which is destructive unlike a patina, so apparently the process is not yet fully understood, but it involves a reaction between chloride and water, which creates hydrochloric acid which then corrodes the material and then caused indentations and holes. Due to the acid they can be filled with green fluff.

As it's called a technical term, I suppose it can break down the brass a lot and corrode it, but overall it works pretty well over time. I studied archeology for several semesters, between almost two thousand three and five, I think, and I saw quite a few finds. I visited several museums and looked at the archaeological record of fines from the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and generally, as soon as the Iron Age hits, there's sort of a drop in fine materials because there's not as much iron preserved that It tends to just be. eaten by rust to a great extent and favorable conditions are needed for it to be well preserved, while bronze, even in fairly adverse conditions, can last quite well, so you have many bronze swords and daggers and various other artifacts from the that there are like they are three thousand years old, they are still in very good condition, all you would need to do is clean them and they would still be usable, whereas iron just loses its structural integrity quite quickly, you can restore it in many cases, but this It's just more. material made of bronze that preserves well even in seawater, which is a terribly corrosive medium, copper and bronze last remarkably well compared to carbon steel, which really does not fare very well and of course, there is a different manufacturing process and bronze is created. artifacts by melting bronze and casting it in a mold, you can cast iron, but that makes it unsuitable for swords, you have to forge it to have the kind of strength and hardness you need, and a cast iron sword is also very, very fragile .

Bronze melts at 60% of the temperature required to melt iron, so it is a little easier to do so and this also makes it perfectly recyclable. You know, let's say a sword breaks into two pieces, three or however many you want and you want to repair it. You can re-weld a steel or iron blade, but this was going to be a potential weak point right there, whereas with bronze you can melt and recast it and, especially if you have a reusable mold, you can basically make several completely identical swords. you know it is identical apart from the hand finishing so you can basically mass produce bronze swords, at least you know that depending on the casting method there are several different methods, there is also the lost wax casting method, which has its own advantages, so what do you do basically? you carve the object you want out of wax, which of course gives you a lot of control over it.

The wax is very soft, malleable, very easy to shape and you can make it quite complex. It's in dye clay, you'll just heat it to melt it. wax and then you have the hollow cavity that we can pour the bronze into. There are other casting methods. You have many different options for making bronze items and then for swords there is work hardening which is crucial. process to refine the edges, so you hammer them, which you take them out with your foot, you make them thinner, so that's a form of sharpening in itself, but what you also do is work hardening, also called work hardening cold, is that it creates irregularities within the crystalline structure of the material, which is why they are called dislocations and plastic deformation means a permanent distortion in the material that is obtained by hammering it and causes these dislocations to move and also creates new dislocations in the material with which they then interact and join and prevent further plastic deformation.

So the material can respond to stress with elastic deformation, as opposed to elastic plastic deformation, which means it will change shape and then return to its original shape once the stress goes away, so if you take a wire or a fairly soft strip of metal. and you keep bending it it will get harder to a certain point and then if you keep doing it it will eventually break because at that point you introduce fractures so you will have little cracks and eventually the material will break excessively so yes with enough do I emphasize that eventually this will break, of course, but it's like with steel, you have this trade-off, on the one hand, you want the edge to be as hard as possible so that it stays sharp for a long time and doesn't just bend and become dull.

Otherwise it warps but you also don't want it to break and ship etc so there are ways to optimize that in bronze so it's a really

fascinating

process as it's not easy to make a particular bronze sword or really any bronze. object, so I have tremendous respect for bronze workers and like any metal worker, but this is definitely a different process compared to iron and steel and finally, of course, the appearance and color are something which I really like about bronze. Polished steel can be very pretty, especially the pattern, well it's steel of course it has its own kind of beauty but just in terms of color this is really pretty it looks a lot like red gold and basically like a sunset. the way the color changes when the sun sets and then bathes everything more in red, that's what I associated with it, it's a warmer color and that affects the mood to a certain extent.

I mean, I'm not claiming that just by looking at a bronze sheet for a while, you'll be in a better mood, although it works, but it's an attractive color, at least for me personally, it's a really nice material, especially when it's highly polished. , basically looks like a sun on its own. I mean the all metal glynne, you know it amazingly and mysteriously in the light, but bronze, especially, so of course you know it has drawbacks, it's substantially softer than steel, like I said, it's obsolete by a reason when it comes to the leaves. I'd still like to perfect a bronze folding knife, you know, just for beauty and novelty, it's not really, it wouldn't be a great everyday carry knife because it would go bad pretty quickly compared to modern steels, but yeah, there's definitely something about that, plus it's pretty low. maintenance compared to steel blades like this one that I've had since 2014.

I don't even need to oil it, it just sits there and everything it does is dark and low, but I don't know if you can see that here. the tip is a little brighter, it's a little more yellow, while the rest is darker and more reddish, that's because I had it for a while and displayed it as a small block of Styrofoam with a tip, so the tip was. It's not exposed to air so you can see it's the original color and the rest darkens and can change appearance over time in interesting ways, anyway that's all for now so those are reasons for me like bronze, as far as I'm concerned.

I'm worried. I hope you found this entertaining and informative and let me know what you think about bronze. As you like? Check out the links in the description below. Also consider supporting me on Patreon and subscribe. Star if you wish and you have a good one friends thanks for watching