JAPANESE SWORDS

Japanese swords forged in the old traditional way (nihonto) were made of tamahagane. The raw material was iron sand, which was extracted from old river beds and sedimentary silt. Very low-carbon, pure iron was melted in a smelter (tatara). After several days of heating, the carbon diffused from the charcoal into the iron. The result was a pure unalloyed iron with variable, though generally high carbon content (0.5-1.5%), then by repeated foldings its uniformity was increased exponentially.
This process was the only way to obtain high-quality steel with the technological background that was available for the Japanese at the time, and it proved to be an excellent method even after the industrial revolution.  
At Pyraster, the raw material is our own pure, unalloyed, high-carbon steel mixture, which is not tamahagane (for this word is used only for the Japanese iron made in the manner mentioned above) but has the same properties, and it is equivalent in the practical sense.
Our blades usually have between 15 and 100 thousand layers, which means that they are folded about 15 to 20 times. (See this “sandwiching” technique above where we talk about forge-welding Damascus steel)
The heat treatment of the blades is carried out by the traditional clay-covering method. The blades with visible heat treatment lines (hamon) are the result of many years of experimentation. Nowadays we can produce a plethora of different hamons.

The blades are ground and polished by a master sword grinder (Domán Szabó or Lajos Tóth) who implements original handcrafting methods, using authentic Japanese stones.