F yeah! One of my favorites. Such a good all around (and really tough at working hardness steels).
There’s a certain mystique around the old stuff. Just look at Japanese swords. Original tamahagane wasn’t some sort of super steel. In fact it’s fairly meh. The layering was just to drive off impurities. The genius was in the purification and the composite structure of the blades, using different carbon content steels to maximize hardness on the edge where you need it, while giving some toughness to the spine or core. I’ve made tamahagane, and honestly it’s a much lower performing steel due to the almost total lack of alloying elements (even when done really well). Historical Japanese smiths would have killed for some of our factory 1070 or 5160. Some people got really bent about Howard Clark’s L6 bainite “Japanese” blades, but I suspect that historical smiths and samurai would have been really really interested in them…
