Aluminium, Titanium or something else (non-iron Tools)

[Majin Gojira]

This is an odd little topic, but it's a nagging idea for me.

Alright, most Fae creatures have a pronounced weakness or repulsion from Iron, even Steel in many cases. However, they are also shown using metal instruments regularly and that these tools are much better than those of puny mortals for one reason or another. Most of the time it's chalked up to magic, but I've always wondered what the base metal being used was. Eventually I thought Titanium was the best to work with them, but a talk with others brought up the idea of Aluminum being a better option (as they put it, it has all the properties that Tolkein ascribed Mithril or something like that).

But could it be something else too.

What are the best options (beyond Bronze and Lead) for a super-duper metal for the faerie to use? Is it a pure metal or an alloy or something else?

I'd rather not have elves with Carbon Nanotube tech or something like that.

[Starglider]

Aluminium is too soft for cutting tools or anything that takes a lot of scratches or impacts; even alloyed it does not hold a good edge. Tungsten carbide is ideal for cutting tools but it is a bit brittle for impact tools (e.g. chisels). Titanium works great, it's just very expensive.

[Grumman]

Aluminium has no fatigue limit, so it probably isn't a good choice for tools. Basically, while big loads will eventually break either a steel or aluminium tool, lots of little loads will break aluminium but not break steel - not as quickly, at least.

[Napoleon the Clown]

Titanium would require either technology such settings never have or magic anyway. Smelting it requires an inert atmosphere or it combusts. Melting it also requires an inert atmosphere, since the ignition point is lower than the melting point in normal atmospheric conditions. Also, the melting point is quite high, which would make it harder for that tech level to work at all.

Aluminum is a lot easier to smelt and work, and some alloys would actually be viable for a lot of applications. I haven't read much about which alloys of aluminum are good for what, though.

Tungsten is completely beyond that tech level's ability to do anything with. You've gotta expose the ore to a ton of heat to get rid of some of the impurities, then use the correct acid to get rid of the rest. You'd be left with a powder that needs to be mixed with a binding agent, pressed into the shape you need with a shitton of force, them exposed to some more heat. As mentioned, tungsten carbide is very brittle. Pure tungsten is something that is insanely difficult to get melted down to actually form anything out of, considering the only thing that remains solid at a higher temperature is carbon with the right structure, and we all know what carbon does when you heat it up with oxygen present. Tungsten's other problem is it's fucking heavy. For a weapon, this is bad. A couple kilograms is all the more weight most any weapon needs. If you need something that can be made crazy sharp and stay that way, obsidian does that better than damn near anything else.


Issue with trying to replace tools and weapons with something that lacks iron is that anything that's better in most fields is much more difficult to work with. Titanium is an utter pain in the ass to refine, which is why it's so damn expensive. The stuff is extremely common, it's just that refining it into a form you can make weapons and tools out of takes a means of keeping the stuff out of the presence of oxygen and nitrogen, both of which it is able to burn in when it gets hot enough. Tungsten is an enormous PITA, too, considering the absurdly high melting point. Aluminum is decidedly soft....

Any of the metals that could be "better" than a mix of iron and carbon show major weaknesses in that they would require technology to refine and work that is simply beyond the things available in such settings. There's a reason iron supplanted bronze so totally for tool use. It's very easily attained and it's relatively easy to work with.

[InsaneTD]

What about an aluminium/bronze alloy?

[Broomstick]

Apparently there is some use for aluminum bronze but none of it apparently involving edged weapons or tools. Probably because steel is superior for that in our tech.

Prior to the Iron/Steel age, though, people DID have knives, chisels, and other edged tools. The Ancient Egyptians used copper, at least at first, for chisels although they seem to have spent as much time sharpening them as using them, and employed other stone-splitting techniques for large blocks. Bronze will serve for a lot of sharp edge purposes - witness all the swords and knives of the Bronze Age - even if not as well as iron and steel.

Another metal I haven't heard mentioned is beryllium, which we also currently utilize, but it's quite light which impairs it use for some types of weaponry and it can be highly toxic and lead to all sorts of health problems.

[Elheru Aran]

Think a little less high-tech, guys.

Wood.

Bear with me. There's some species out there that are even harder and tougher than some metals. Lignum-vitae is even heavy enough that it actually sinks in water, plus it has the splendid property of being self-lubricating, as it's naturally greasy. This makes it highly suitable for, say, hinges and moving parts, as you don't have to wax it or anything. Boxwood is extremely close-grained and dense; it was used for making wear strips and such. Ebony, while brittle, is extremely hard and can be machined to a high degree of precision. Even more common woods could be used in various applications. If painted or treated in various fashions, they can be indistinguishable from metal.

Also consider that the *whole* tool doesn't have to be metal. Take a socket wrench; you could make the handle out of wood and the ratcheting head and sockets out of silicon bronze.

What kind of tech base are we talking about here, though? Medieval? Magic-tech? Industrial Age? Because you're not going to get silicon bronze with medieval tech, I don't think...

[Majin Gojira]

I was considering a society either at Renaissance or early modern (1700s) era stuff, based primarily on Victorian Authors making elves and other fair folk effecitvely medieval in culture in their day, I wanted to have them advance a little bit technologically, but still be well behind modern humanity tech wise.

[Broomstick]

Also consider that the *whole* tool doesn't have to be metal. Take a socket wrench; you could make the handle out of wood and the ratcheting head and sockets out of silicon bronze.

Consider Aztec swords: obsidian chips embedded around the edges of a wooden "blade". This is a replica, but it gives you an idea of what I'm talking about:

They're actually quite effective, and you can replace any chipped or shattered bladelets. Shows you want happens in a society with no metals other than gold, silver, and copper. The Aztecs never even got to the bronze age.

There are your edges, guys - obsiden and by extension glass. People have also used glass with flintknapping techniques, too.



Of course, glass is brittle but all materials have their good points and bad points. Meanwhile, as noted, there are woods out there that can be used in place of metals and probably were before the Iron Age, along with things like leather and rope.

If you want to go even more high tech have the Elves utilize something like fiberglass - basically, a woven material impregnated with resins of some sort that can be shaped into useful objects, often ones that are both strong and light. Doesn't have to be glass fiber, you can use almost anything - cotton, linen, silk...

Well, hey, there you go - lots of Elf scenarios have them all bonkers about wood and glass/crystals.

[LaCroix]

Even though you mentioned it - Brass/Bronze...

Yes - good, old brass. That stuff can go toe to toe with some types of steel, and some of the more exotic alloys are more than a match for everything a medieval forge could produce.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_copper_alloys

If you were to study hardness distribution along the blade in early/middle medieval swords, you will notice that most of them had an average Rockwell hardness of about 40-45, with local values of 30 to 60. A well made bronze/brass sword (manganese or phosphor bronze, cartrige or free-cutting brass) would cleave through that.

Silicone bronze would probably be an almost magic metal to them...

[Esquire]

Could you say why? It's tricky to find out the properties of particular alloys without knowing where to look.

[LaCroix]

Sorry, I have to retract my earlier statement - I misread the hardness data on bronzes (There are a gazillion scales and you can mix it up quite easily).
The best bronze/Brass will reach about 225 Brinell/20 Rockwell(C) - certainly worse than a steel sword, but still much better than a mild steel (Brinell 130)

Ignore what I've said.

[madd0ct0r]

nobody mentioned ceramic blades yet?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_knife

A ceramic knife is a knife made out of very hard and tough ceramic, often zirconium dioxide (ZrO2; also known as zirconia). These knives are usually produced by dry pressing zirconia powder and firing them through solid-state sintering. The resultant blade is sharpened by grinding the edges with a diamond-dust-coated grinding wheel. Zirconia is 8.5 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, compared to 7.5 to 8 for hardened steel and 10 for diamond. This very hard edge rarely needs sharpening.

Obvious issues with brittleness, but the Aztec style multiple replaceable blades on a less brittle core would still work

[Majin Gojira]

Great points!

Now I'm starting to wonder how effective ceramics inserts are in a woven armor (silk/kevlar sort of thing) against blades and arrows.

[Elheru Aran]

Great points!

Now I'm starting to wonder how effective ceramics inserts are in a woven armor (silk/kevlar sort of thing) against blades and arrows.

Find out, say, the average thickness and material strength of said inserts (there's probably something online for bulletproof vests). Then figure the average kinetic energy and impact force of such. Similar to what someone (Wong?) did for calcs on stormtrooper armour based upon numbers from the YJK series.

I would take a stab at it myself (see what I did there?) but a.) I don't have that much time right now and b.) I'm math-impaired, unfortunately...