Can Shardblades Cut Aluminum?

[Swimmingly]

The thing is, there dosen't seem to be a lot of scholarly work centred around shardblades outside the artifabrian community. Shards are regarded as holy, indestructible relics by many, so nobody bothers to test and see if anything can't be cut my them - they assume it's pointless

[Satsuoni]

Personally,because of the resons mentioned above, I don't think the guards are aluminium.

I'll reiterate, to organize my thoughts:

1. Aluminium is a known metal. Nobody seems to know what the guards are made of. Not even "seems like aluminum"

2. Aluminium does not, by itself, have ability to mold to anything, nor does it have variable ductility/hardness. While weak, it is soft and ductile, it bends and crumples rather than breaks.

3. If it did, by itself, have ability to resist shardblade... Soulcaster soulcast stone buildings, from air. How many sets of armor do you think can be made from one building's worth of material? Soulcast paper to foil, stick it inside your armor instead of the outside, voila - instant shard protection. It is probably expensive because nobody usually bothers soulcasting jewelry, concentrating on food and structures. And metal, which is what novice soulcasters practice on. Useful metal, so they probably don't consider aluminium to be such.

 

Also, unrelated to aluminium, but related to the topic:

Old fabrials, like soulcasters and Oathgates. And Shardplates, for that matter. Note the peculiarity: none of them seem (to me) to have trapped spren. All have swappable gems and metal framework. Note that Navani can fix Soulcasters, but nobody can make new ones. My pet theory is that Radiants of old had access to sprenmetal, that they developed after observing their spren turn into metal Shadblades.

It was mentioned before, and it can be seen that spren that allow surges and spren that perform   (or are attracted to?) surges are not always (never?) the same - the stone is held (or attracts) by some kind of violet spren, not Honorspren. If some order of radiants (bondsmiths? willshapers?) could coax such spren into metal form, without human bond, the resulting metal could, theoretically, be used as fabrial template for various surge based fabrials, Shardplate and possibly guards.

As the spren would be without bond (or ability to form one) and non-sentient, they would probably not mind being static metal, won't scream, etc.

 

As for guards breaking - there is a possibility that, if you stick two lumps on shardblade, they would merge while they mold to it, like clay, thereby fixing the thing.