I heard Japanese swords are folded something like a million times?
While Japanese swords might have thousands of layers, the process of folding was not often carried above 15 times. Most folded Japanese swords will have around 32,768 layers. Folding is where you take an ingot of metal, pound it out, and literally fold it back on itself, creating layers. This process is repeated again and again to draw out impurities in the original material and make a more uniform hunk of metal. Early Japanese smiths often used iron sand, a very poor raw material for making blades, and so the practice of folding greatly improved the finished blade. Folding too much actually produces a weaker blade and makes it brittle. If a sword really could be folded a million times, the space between the layers of iron would be thinner than the iron atoms themselves. I think we all can see the problem with that. Modern steel of high quality does not need to be folded to make a stronger blade as much of the impurities have been expunged during the smelting process. However, a modern
