uLike blade designs

For a change of pace, here's an ax I designed today for an RPG character of mine.







Kinda like a small bardiche. It's partly inspired by the silly Axe of Rexor from Conan the Barbarian but a more handy 36 inches overall - sort of a hand-and-a-half or bastard ax, with a 12-inch main edge good for cutting up soft targets and a slightly thicker, narrower 2 inches wide back blade for chopping into armour.

Or use it up close like a knuckleduster, yeah.

Sort of continuing the polearm theme, here's a nasty little idea I had today...





Meet Razor, a 36-inch brute of a sword, a grossly overgrown bowie or perhaps a very short glaive. The deeply hollow ground blade - like a razor, hence the name - is 24 inches long and 2.5 inches wide, with a narrow fuller along the spine and a 22-inch cutting edge. The hilt is 12 inches, including the 2-inch bolster.

There's no pommel to balance the heavy blade, but the tang is very thick and almost the full width of the grip (all the way - it actually grows wider towards the end, just like the grip).







The metal hilt components are silver gilt iron. The rope-textured bolster is partially hollow, overlapping the grip scales. The grip itself is made of two pieces of black horn, fixed by three quatrefoil rivets.

The scabbard is black leather over wood, also with silver gilt iron fittings. There are rings on top and at the back for attaching a baldrick. If you're paying really close attention you might have noticed it's set up for carrying at the right side. This is not just for the benefit of lefties, either: it can come in handy in close quarters (relatively speaking) or on horseback, and the shortish blade makes drawing it from the right relatively easy.

This is a kind of a companion piece to the Wehrwolf - a vampire killing sword. As the more educated of you may know, the surest way to kill a vampire in actual folklore is to cut off its head and then burn everything; staking was originally just a means to nail the supernaturally sanguine corpse securely to its coffin so it wouldn't stray abroad by night. Remember, Dracula himself was originally killed with a kukri through the neck (following a Bowie knife through the heart). Usually the decapitation could be effected with any old blade, but if you wanted to be absolutely sure, you could use a gravedigger's spade, for obvious symbolic reasons. I figured a sword of justice, with all its associated symbolism of death, final justice and absolution, should do just as well.





It's called the Scharfrichter. Quoting Wikipedia just because it's so damn convenient:



So, pretty darn appropriate for a weapon made to destroy the undead.







It's a large beheading sword, 48 inches overall, though of a form less specialized than some: the design is completely focused on dealing powerful edge blows, but balanced for use as a fighting weapon as well as an instrument of execution. The 37.5-inch blade is 2.4 inches wide at the guard and, unlike most swords of justice that tend to have entirely parallel edges, tapers to 1.8 inches before the spatulate point.

There's a narrow fuller 17.5 inches long, with the first and last line of the Catholic mass for the dead inlaid in iron along the length of it on one side: "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis," meaning "Rest eternal grant unto them, Lord: and light perpetual shine upon them." (The variant spelling "eternam" is intentional.) A simple plea for mercy and absolution in its original context, but addressed to the restless creatures of the night it's also a condemnation. The other side bears a similar but shorter inscription: "Requiesce in pace", meaning "Rest in peace" in the imperative sense, not as a wish (as in the more usual "requiescat", ie. "may you rest") but a command to lay down and be at peace at last, semprini.





The hilt components are iron. I'm not quite sure what classification the pommel would fit under, but it's a design I've seen on several historical swords and quite like. The leather-over-cord wrapped grip is oval in cross-section and 7 inches long, with an additional 3 inches of length in the pommel should you need the extra reach or leverage. The crossguard is a hair over 8 inches wide, with a peaked quillon block and straight arms, square in cross-section and turned into a sort of corkscrew writhen pattern, that flare out into large, flat mushroom or rounded disk shaped terminals. The quillon block is decorated with a small cross inlaid in silver.

The sheath is a suitably somber thing of black leather over wood, with an iron chape and two iron bands to which the three rings for the suspension system attach, with cross-shaped cutouts echoing the inlay on the guard.

You always come up with some of the best stuff, MOK. You've also just given me an idea...

EDIT: And here it is. The horribly named Vampire Spade:



This thing is meant for one thing and one thing only: lopping off vampire heads. It has an 8" plain wooden grip, and simplistic bronze fittings (though I didn't quite get the color right). The "blade" overall is 24" long, but the cutting edge proper, the "spade", is only 9". The rest is completely blunted with a square cross section, partially inspired by an old Jody Samson piece dubbed the "boar sword"; the fuller pretty much exists solely to reduce weight and make sure all the weight is near the tip for heavy chopping. I couldn't quite figure out how to do an inward spine to shape it more like a traditional spade, but that's really not important. Aside from the obvious with the silver cross on the grip (removable as a last line of defense against the vampires!), I chose a rare Type N (rare as in almost no surviving examples exist, but seems pretty common in period art) pommel because of its boat shape. I thought it better reflected the wedge shape found on old spade handles; plus, it's also shaped so you could grip it in a "palm loaded" fashion, with your other hand near the guard, a simple Style 7, and really get a good hacking blow.

Hadn't thought of that.

That is pretty sweet lookin', MOK, but I think I still kinda prefer the MKI Tanto; of course, if I had my choice, I'd go with the Migration Bowie you designed for me. :lol:

By the way, after I tried out a different fishtail pommel for my recent Fishtail XIV, I couldn't help but wonder how you did the fishtail on Scharfrichter? I've got a fairly good idea of how you did the guard after looking at it (and am going to put it to the test here in a sec), but I've only got a mild inkling on the pommel; did you move the top two nodes downward to achieve the inward curve?

Yeah, why not - the way I see it the main improvements with the MKII are the better thought out sheath and hilt assembly, and swapping in a different blade type should be fairly trivial.


Well, it's like this: