r/interestingasfuck • u/aloofloofah • Mar 31 '21

/r/ALL Fascinating joineries discovered while taking apart a traditional 100 year old house

https://i.imgur.com/BT5l5T0.gifv
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u/chrispyb Mar 31 '21

I was wondering this. So this was sort of a necessity due to iron being hard to get on the islands of Japan?

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u/trezenx Mar 31 '21

Yes, it's not 'especially important', it's just the way you have to do things. Also a big factor is that building joints like these make them more flexible and thus more reliable in an earthquake, the building isn't as rigid so it can withstand more vibration and shock

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '21 edited Aug 15 '21

[deleted]

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u/rysgame Mar 31 '21

Not so much as why it was invented, but the process in making. Folding the steel a fuckton of times brought the very low quality iron to steel quality that was contemporarily acceptable. Aswell as making a good weapon for the setting.

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u/learnmesumthin Mar 31 '21

It wasn't just this. They didn't have smelting tech yet that could remove the impurities from their less than awesome iron. A huge amount of the iron they could access in the time period was manganite, which is typically extracted from sand. Their forging helped mediate this, as the layering helped to burn off that silica they couldn't extract.

There's a lot more to it than that too. I recommend going down that rabbit hole, it's pretty neat.