the vikings

[engineerone]

cruising through the digi channels i happened across a discovery
programme about the vikings.

very interesting, clever b***tards. i had not realised that the keel of their boats were 16metre lengths of oak which had been cleaved from various tree trunks, when they had finished laying it out, the oak beam would flex up to 1 metre from side to side.

the boats were clinker built, and amazingly, they went at a speed of up to 16 knots. they also used wool sails very interesting.

also some interesting knowledge about their steel making skills too, maybe that is why swedish steel is still so good

paul

[mel]

dont want to be pickey paul
but dont you think this should be in the wooden boats section ??

[engineerone]

yes mel. but then no body would read it ;D

paul

[thebloke]

Aug 28, 2008 19:12:34 GMT engineerone said:

very interesting, clever b***tards.

also some interesting knowledge about their steel making skills too, maybe that is why Swedish steel is still so good

paul

I heard a snippet on the box a long time ago that about a Viking raid on one of the monasteries in the north of England. One of them hacked vertically at a monk and the blade caught him on the shoulder. Apparently the said Viking must have had a sub-standard bit of steel in his sword that day 'cos he was a bit dismayed that the blade didn't exit through the monk's crutch

[Scrit]

Aug 28, 2008 19:12:34 GMT engineerone said:

boats were clinker built, and amazingly, they went at a speed of up to 16 knots. they also used wool sails very interesting.

Meybe so, but the scots took a leaf ouit of their book and built smaller, lighter and imprtantly faster copies of the Norse boats which were then used to drive off the Vikings.

Interesting then that the descendents of the Vikings up in Shetland are campaigning for their local place names/road signs on bilingual signs in future, this visitors who find themselves heading for Leir-vik (which apparently translates as "sh*t Creek") without a map may be excused a few Anglo- Saxon oaths of their own as they attempt to navigate their way to the island capital of Lerwick. ;D

Aug 28, 2008 19:12:34 GMT engineerone said:

also some interesting knowledge about their steel making skills too, maybe that is why swedish steel is still so good

Nah. Swedish ore is of very high grade (i.e. low in impurities) which made it easier for the iron makers to start with. In the 1960s when they started importing Spanish ores they worked out a way to sinter the ore to improve its quality. Apart from that the Swedes were always much quicker than Sheffield to adopt new techniologies such as the LD Converter rather than piddling around with small, and therefore inconsistent batches of crucible steel (and I believe we're still piddling about with Siemens-Martin furnaces in the UK........). So I don't think that Viking steel can explain the current quality of tool and HSS steel from Sweden. I think you'd find that the better Indonesian or Brazillian HSS is almost as good these days at a fraction of the cost

Scrit

[engineerone]

as usual interesting comments scrit,

i had not heard about those two steel makers so am interested to see that you believe they are so good.

as for british steel, ie corus, the problem originally was the size of the sites they used to make steel in, and of course in the late 50's bad management and union relations.

when working in the late 60's selling furnace linings we used to leap across the open hearths to see where they were failing because they were so near to capacity that they were only shut down for an almost complete failure.

in those days every new factory was built on the basis that increases in sales would never stop, so they aimed for profit at about 95% of production because they felt it was the only way to compete with cheap imported steel. of course that was and always will be wrong, which is why nowadays corus only make specialist steels in small batches, and still have production problems but at least a smaller employee base

from a follow up programme today what is even more interesting is that in newfoundland there is more evidence that the vikings did actually reach the american continent, around 950=1050
centuries. but it seems that they were hammered by the algonquin indians, which ruined their overseas empire building desires.

of course, we forget that the normans were so called because they had come from the north and were decendants of vikings.
and of course, many shetlanders were evolved, rather like they
now say the angles, and saxons evolved from the vikings too.

history is such fun ;D

paul