Honestly, Oily, I believe you need to re-examine your basic knowledge of knife and sword-smithing. Perhaps Kirk can weigh in here?My personal "live" training dao is a steel-aluminum mixed alloy that allows for a sturdy blade that doesn't bend or shard, but it's a lot better than springsteel or straight up aluminum (which won't survive much blade-on-blade sparring contact because it's too malleable, even wood is safer imho).
The two on the cover of Judkins are legitimate 19th century hudiedao used during the Opium Wars and the Red Turban Revolt, and other fun times.
I'll have to dig into the metallurgy to see what these might have been made of, but it probably wasn't steel. Probably mostly iron. China is the oldest civilization to cast it.
First of all I doubt that you have any kind of dao or other blade made of an aluminum-steel alloy. The melting points and other properties of those two metals are so different that they are never alloyed together in blades!
Secondly, The long, slender 19th Century hu die dao pictured would certainly have been made of steel. Cast iron was not used for blades and would have been unsuitable compared with steel or layered iron and steel laminates. So steel was used for dao going all the way back to the Warring States period some four centuries BCE.
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