So is this the stub twist being talked about?
http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.asp?Item=83569015
I have found it confusing as this "horse shoe nail" business keeps getting brought up in the literature. I should add that I have rarely seen the Belgians refer to it. Mostly the English and American literature. To a lesser extent the Germans, but not from the period literature, mainly modern recreators.
As I understand it, and I am very open to correction here... Horse shoe nails would have been equilavent to soft tool steel today, ie, very low carbon content. Horse shoe nails would have been melted down, so any supposed effect of beating against coble stones would be negated. I seems to me that horse shoe nails were merely a source of cheap low carbon iron. Much the same to casting lead bullets from wheel weights is done today.
The billet would still have to arranged in the same way no matter the source of the metal. All the steps of forge welding, twisting etc would not be altered. Even the final etching process would not have changed.
Later the Belgians complained when coke was used to smelt instead of charcoal. But that was because it introduced silicon impurities to the product making it some what less malleable. Still after this, they went on to achieve an even higher level of technical expertise in the production of their damascus, embedding names directly into the patterns. They simply could not have had enough horses in Belgian to keep producing tons of barrels year after year.
So, again, why this talk of Horse shoe nails?
Pete
