Magnetic alloy alternatives for weapons

Lead makes for a floppy sword, but a great cudgel. Tin - not much strength, but takes an edge and looks shiny.
How about going really old school?
Go stone age!
Wooden club with obsidian blades along the edges, stone tied to the end of a wood handle. For that matter, a hard wood could take a sharp enough edge to kill, or just put a point on it, make a spear.

How 'post' your apocalypse is your setting? A generation or so with no electricity, where there aren't many conductive metals, and all the books have rotted would make 'the magic of the olden days' just another legend.

Linnabelle said:

I need magnetic metals that aren't conductive, and still able to be mined fairly easily with iron age technology.

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Good luck with this. The only strongly magnetic metallic elements are iron, cobalt and nickel, plus some rare earth elements. None of these are found as native elemental materials on earth (excepting iron in meteorites), and for standard chemical reasons, it would be unlikely for them to be found as native elements anywhere else. And I don't understand your need for the metal to be non-conductive. All metals conduct electricity to varying extents, some (copper, aluminum) much more efficiently than others (lead). But what is the point of that characteristic in a post-apocalyptic society lacking electric technology? Why do you even need magnetism? The first metal swords made on earth were of bronze, largely because copper does occur as a native element, and is commonly mixed with tin in ores.

As for a lack of iron, that too would be pretty strange. Iron is the second most abundant metal element in the crust of the earth, next to aluminum, because it is an enormously abundant element in the universe. It would be very odd to have it depleted by some apocalyptic event. The stuff is around, everywhere. And the first iron smelting was from naturally occurring iron oxide minerals, which are very abundant. Nickel and cobalt are much less common, so the likelihood of them being around when iron is not is pretty remote. There's a reason why steel is made from iron, alloyed with other less common metal elements (e.g., titanium, vanadium, manganese, molybdenum, chromium) which are harder to find and produce.

caw

"A new element forms" is going to lose you any reader with a shred of scientific knowledge.

Honestly, the scenario you propose is scientifically so far-fetched and implausible that really, why bother dressing it up in "science" at all? Just accept that you're writing a fantasy with magic that does whatever your story needs it to do and go ahead from there.

Well, you could make it that such metals are perceived as being the root of all evil and are banned for religious reasons.

Yeah, making things that basically are what the planet is made of scarce is not possible. Iron exists in great relative abundance compared to cobalt and nickel. Magnetism exists because the core of our spinning blob in space is molten iron. Any disruption to the earth's magnetic field would be catastrophic, but not permanent; the earth keeps turning. Your characters may be in an area that is locally low on iron or aluminum, but that doesn't remove it from the planet. And conductivity is a physical property of metallic elements; you'd need to alter the physical universe to pull off what you want to happen.

I guess you could try some old school alchemy and claim that all the Fe atoms were transmogrified into Cobalt or Nickel, but you'd have to explain how our blood and breathing now works because iron on red blood cells moves oxygen around our bodies (and it does that by basic magnetism of positive Fe ions being held in place by the negative charge on hemoglobin).

You need magic not science if you want this to be even remotely plausible to anyone who's passed grade 5 science class.

Or, set it on another planet so you aren't constrained by the physical properties of this one.

If I understand correctly, you don't want an abundance of conductive materials present because you don't want electrical devices to hasten the return of technology. I agree with the others that such an environment cannot be achieved credibly. Maybe a better solution is to simply accept that you are re-starting history in the iron age, and maybe you can place some controls over those that retain the knowledge of modern technology. Bear in mind that even given the knowledge of electricity, smart phones and passenger jets, with zero existing operating examples and infrastructure to build them, it would take several generations to get there anyway.

Not read the other replies, but I write palaeolithic fiction, i.e. set a very long time before metal was a thing. (Okay so there were small amounts of native metals just lying around in nature, but they're not much use for toolmaking.)

So anyway, in a world where metal can't be used as technology... use stone. Flint and other knappable rocks (knappable means you can make it into a blade by knocking flakes off... any rock that has a similar structure to glass, basically) can be used to make lethal weapons.

Here are some options that might work instead of a sword:

Neandertal style spear for close range hunting of large animals (e.g. bison, mammoths) also would be lethal to humans - approx 6 foot long spear shaft (you can straighten tree branches by using fire) + large stone blade hafted to the end (blade is around 3-6" in length - it's not the size that does the damage but the sharp edges - the long shaft is what enables it to do internal damage to the mammoth)

Neolithic axe - is capable of chopping down trees (and being used to kill people). http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/lowres-picturecabinet.com/29/main/3/60996.jpg it's harder to make than palaeolithic tools but you don't need metal to make one

Long range weapons: make arrows or thin spears with tiny blades. You need to use upper palaeolithic flintknapping techniques which is a bit more like using a hammer and chisel to knock tiny flakes off a flint core (as opposed to just hitting the flint with a hammerstone as per earlier technology). You can touch up the small blades using a pressure flaker (stone age flintknapping tool) to remove tiny bits of flint and shape it. It has to be small and light to be aerodynamic. Then you can haft it to a wooden arrow or spear shaft (again keeping it thin and light) and shoot them using either a bow or an atlatl (spear thrower).

If they have access to a wide range of rocks, obsidian (a kind of volcanic glass) has scarily sharp edges. But even plain old flint is just like glass and you can get nasty cuts from it (it's recommended to wear leather gloves while flintknapping, or have a piece of leather covering the hand that's holding the flint)

Flintknapping techniques work on glass (if you're in a post-apocalyptic world and there's lots of scrap glass about the place) in fact there are quite a few instructional flintknapping videos that advise people to practice on glass as flint can be hard to come by in the modern world. Upper palaeolithic techniques tend to be more appropriate for glass as glass objects tend to be quite thin (e.g. old bottle glass) and you need a hefty lump of flint for lower and middle palaeolithic techniques.

You tube is full of videos of how to make ancient technology not just how to make the stone blades but also how to haft them on (something that dates back to the middle palaeolithic era - it's currently thought the Neandertals used a kind of glue made by heating birch bark although they're not 100% sure how they made it - and there are other ways besides this one to make a glue using palaeolithic technologies). Also, I'm not that clued up about the neolithic era (it's too modern for me ) but there may be other things besides the neolithic axe that can be used as a hand held weapon. But I wouldn't want to meet someone wielding a neolithic axe in a dark alley.

Flintknapping reusing old glass! I never would have thought of that! And, you're right - if our world is in ruins, there'd be lots of it around.
It occurs to be that if OP wants a 'blacksmithing' economy, a glassworking economy would also work - if you can get a fire hot enough to work metal, I imagine you could get it hot enough to remelt scraps of glass into thick lumps in a mold. Rough cast shapes then knapp them into the finished shape.
I don't know how long it would take to go from simple melting and casting to more complex shapes, or glassblowing, but the Romans had glass bottles.

And, glass doesn't conduct anything, as far as I know, which is why powerline insulators are glazed ceramic.
Yay, no electricity!

The bronze age predated the iron age. Just sayin...

Jeff