eli5 How were such intricate items like suits or armour and castle decorations made in the medieval era when they lacked advanced metal processing and precision tools we have today
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The tools and techniques used in medieval blacksmithing really haven’t changed much.
Watch Forged In Fire if you’d like some examples. They still furnaces to heat the steel, hammers and anvils to work it, and grinders to grind it.
The biggest difference is that a lot of these tools are now powered by electricity rather than humans.
You bonk the metal until it fits right. If it doesn’t fit right, it means you need to bonk it some more.
How do you think we developed precision tools to begin with? We had to know how to do it to make a tool to do it.
Ancient humans were likely much smarter than modern humans. The average human IQ in developed countries has been slowly decreasing for decades that we have recorded.
I asked a similar question in a different thread months ago about swords.
If you were a soldier and couldn’t afford a sword, you used a wooden spear. The same would go for armor. You either went with a leather suit of armor or no armor at all.
The thing is. Technologically a suit of armor isn’t that much.
Metallurgy? You need steel that’s sufficiently pure that it can be stretched and work hardened (ie, you hammer it to compress the steel to make it tougher). That was solved with the blast furnace (which was able to take iron up to its melting point and get rid of most of the slag/impurities). Compared to making cannon barrels or battleship plating that’s child’s play.
Tolerances? If it’s within a millimeter or so it’s enough. In fact you want some slack and loose joints so that armor pieces can slide against each other (that means the guy inside the suit is far more mobile than if you had sub-millimeter tolerances everywhere).
Mass production challenges? Each suit is individually made and tailored, so no interchangeable parts or anything like that.
Overall it all boils down to craftsmanship and design, long apprenticeships and several decades of trial and error solved those issues. Beyond the need for blast furnaces most of the gear necessary are a bunch of hammers and tongs of different sizes and shapes.
When Apollo whatever went to the moon, it was worked out manually. A phone today has zillions times the power of the computers they had then.
$$$$$$ if a nobleman or master of horse has the $$$$$$ to aquire the ore. I as a blacksmith would get hammering. These were not little operations. 5 blacksmiths working for a year could complete 3 complete teuton knights. Thats bugatti/ferrari territory that we can all understand.
They looked like crap but you had o e and no one else did so yours was automatically the best one they had ever seen.
Not including OP in the scope of this, but it gets my goat when armchair archaeologists say “there’s no way these <insert brown person> could have cut a stone block so square, or lifted it, or aligned it accurately with the stars” or whatever magical tech they are seeking to explain with suspiciously Northern European looking Atlanteans or aliens. The average craftsperson in the past working their entire lives on their specialism far exceeds the skill levels of modern practitioners, who need machine tools just to keep up in many cases!
They had the ability to melt and mold metal, but they didn’t understand as much about the chemistry of making metals.
A suit of armor isn’t built to withstand the same conditions as modern metal things like gun barrels or planes. For the most part, they wouldn’t even stop a direct hit from an arrow.
They also didn’t have machines to do the work, so everything was made by hand.
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