Tempering & quality of mass-produced swords

Well, blades of that era had decent a temper, or so I would think. I have heard of blades slicing heads off in the revolution, and civil war as well. I would think a blade of steel, of that time at least, to not be able to stand up to that kind of treatment without a temper. I researched a lot about this in school Don't know if the source was reliable, but it seemed about accurate.

DI is right; these swords were the production swords of their day. The makers then faced some of the same challenges facing today’s production sword companies, one of which was consistency. Some swords were adequately tempered while others were too soft or too brittle, and were either rejected by the makers, government inspectors, or failed in regimental testing (if conducted) or in the field.

For information on similar cutlasses, I suggest searching for “1804 cutlass” in the Antique & Military Sword forum at SFI. This pattern is very similar to the cutlass from Godwin and some of the discussions are quite interesting. If you are interested in seeing some decent photos of originals, visit the online collections of the British National Maritime Museum (NMM) at www.nmm.ac.uk .



Added: Without photos of your Godwin sword it may be hard to compare the fit and finish of originals v. Godwin replicas. These swords were generally kept in arms lockers under lock and key until needed, and were intended for rank and file sailors, so they were no-frills weapons, but not what I would call crude (maybe crude compared to an officer’s sword). American cutlasses of the time were what I would consider crude, however, but charming in their rugged and awkward appearance.

It just seems that I have heard, or rather read, recently that some mass-produced 18th century military swords often tended to be poorly tempered (especially infantry hangers). One source I read said that some American naval cutlasses during the Revolutionary War actually had iron, rather than steel, blades, since iron was cheaper and more readily obtainable than good steel.

After the Bessemer process was developed (circa 1855), steel improved in a lot of ways. It was cheaper, had fewer impurities, and was more uniform in quality. I would expect American Civil War and later swords to be pretty good. Unfortunately this period also saw the decline of the sword as a weapon of war.

Earlier? Maybe. I'm sure the manufacturing process had a lot more variation, but I don't know whether the final accepted blades did. Part of the point of a sword pattern was that you could do a lot more quality control. You could test all blades to the same standards, etc. I'm sure the militaries of yesteryear did quality testing on their blades before they accepted them, but I don't know how. If they did QC by lot, then some bad ones might have slipped through. If they tested by each individual article, then chances are they were all pretty good.

The American Civil war was a big advancement for industrial production in many areas. There are many examples or where industrial production produced high quality goods and cases where it did not.

Problem with swords was that most officers did not have a clue as to how to use them other then obvious slashes. I read some stats once that of the 700,000 men that died only about 700 were attributed to swords. Muskets, bayonets and canon did most of the work.

Just to put things into prospective... there was a machine invented to cut gunstocks. The craftsmen protested and the machine usage stopped for a while. When the craftsmen could not keep up with the orders, both the machines and craftsmen where used to full capacity. Based on this, I don't think people bothered to temper every sword. From what I know of civil war encounters, swords saw little blade to blade contact anyway. Officers generally lead from the rear and used their sword more as a pointer. If it got to the point, were they had to use their sword to defend themselves... well I think the sword outlasted the officer regardless of temper.

That is indeed a beautiful sword and I am sure some of the very best were made during the American Civil War. I took a detailed course on the Civil War and came away with a good understanding that for much of the war, supplies were in short supply for both the North and the South. The North got its supplies of each item from a number of sources. It had a lot of logistical problems. Soldiers were happy to have shoes in many cases. In the case of weapons and machinery they wanted everything standardized so that the parts would be interchangeable. There are many cases of gun barrels exploding due to poor forging. There were huge variations in the quality of products across the board. You can see it more clearly in guns and cannons because we have more feed back available on them.

Absolutely! In fact I would go a bit farther than that.

I have an M-1831 Austrian Artillery saber that is unissued and unsharpened. If I was told that tomorrow I had to go fight a saber duel, I would rather sharpen that old war horse and fight with it than any modern production saber I have ever handled.