Not trying to flame but an uncle of mine in Japan is a blacksmith who makes these "demascus" steel blades (now retired). I visited his shop when i was a small child but seem to remember that they didn't take all that long to make. They would use a piece of soft and a piece of harder steel and fold them about 15times. 2^15th is somewhere around 30,000. So the steel only has to be folded about 15 times to achieve 30,000 layers. They are expensive though... I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-10,000 bucks... I would imagine a really ornamental one might fetch 25,000

 

Seen this before and it is indeed impressive. .50 Cal can penetrate light tank armor so this shows you how strong the sword actually is.

 

At the same time though I think SOG makes knives and advertises something like the video above. I think it has more to do with the fact that the area of contact on the bullet from the knife edge is so small that it absorbs little energy compared to the same bullet hitting a flat wall (and absorbing all of the bullets energy). I would venture to say a normal piece of steel on edge that was sharpened would fare similarly to the blade in the picture.

I thought the purpose of the damascus steel was primarily flexibility. The two types of steel allowed the blade to be flexible yet maintain a very sharp edge with the harder steel mixed in (though i could be wrong)

 

well i think it is still flexible, if you watch the video you can see the metal flex quite a bit before the final bullet splits it.

 

wow,

imagining those as weapons is scary, that shit would go through a bone like a hot knife through butter....

great stuff!!!

 

Werd multi-lingual report there. I wouldn't mind getting me one of those katanas to display in my house.

 

Did you guys see the mythbusters episode where they fired the .50 cal into water? The bullets shattered on impact, and if you were more than 18" underneath the surface, you would escape unharmed!!!!

Crazy, crazy stuff.