I have no doubt that Chen Shih-Tsung makes high-quality weapons, but I have some reservations about some of the details.  I’m going to skip over the assertion that all ancient swords were forged from meteoric iron.  Let’s assume that the journalist meant that some ancient swords were made from iron that somebody claimed was from a meteor.  There are plenty of stories of meteor events in Chinese history, so that’s plausible.

Do I want to address the idea that using meteoric iron for swordmaking is impossible now because “not enough fall as thousands of years ago”?  Is it more likely that claiming a hunk of iron ore as meteorite shards is possible to authenticate now?  Nah, never mind, that’s not even the part that really has me wondering.

This is the part that stands out:

Grinding a piece of metal on a spinning stone makes it very hot, and heat causes steel to expand; if the bar expands too much it will deform and be useless.

Okay, that’s fine.  But also:

Each day the swordsmith needs to rub the sword with a cloth. This generates heat, and the molecular structure of the steel changes when it becomes hot after wiping. Two to three years of wiping every day and the structure of the steel becomes stable. Blue rays start to deflect off the surface. At that time, the sword will never rust again, and further maintenance is no longer needed.

Wait, what?  The heat from grinding the bar of steel into the shape of a sword causes it to heat up, so you have to ease off before it gets too hot and deforms.  But rubbing the sword with a cloth each day heats it enough to change the molecular structure of the steel?  How does that work?

The rubbing works due to a simple chemical principle. “Iron and steel materials rust when they come into contact with the air because the air contains moisture,” Chen explains. “The moisture in the air is absorbed by the metal though pores and then combined with metal crystal, resulting in a chemical change that causes oxidation and rust. To put it another way, iron and steel materials won’t rust if they don’t have pores.”

All I have to go on is Google and some 11th-grade chemistry classes, but I don’t think “pores” have anything to do with iron oxidation.  Is the surface of the steel somehow different from the steel underneath, so the moisture has to find an entry point through the pores?  This sounds crazy.

The only way to get rid of the pores is to rub the steel until it gets hot, forcing the slight amount of aluminum in it to melt. Since aluminum has a low melting point, it will come to the surface and melt, blocking the pores. It takes years to fully achieve this.

Okay, okay, now we’re on some familiar ground.  Aluminum alloys do have a low melting point.  Well, low for metals.  As low as 620ºC.  That’s about of 1150º Fahrenheit.

I don’t care how many years you spend hand-polishing a sword.  I don’t care what sort of cloth you use.  You aren’t melting aluminum, drawing it out of the steel, and using it to block oxidation.  I don’t know what you’re doing, but that’s not it.

With all that said, I’m sure Mr. Chen makes beautiful, valuable weapons.  I’m sure that the time and attention that he and his sons put into hand-crafting and polishing ensures that the end results are worth the incredibly high prices they command.  I just think the “science” in the explanation is tissue-paper thin and immediately makes all the other claims suspect.