let's start with the easy stuff: aesthetics.
your XVIIIb is pretty good looking. I wouldn't worry about the spiral groove in the guard, won't be a problem.
this is hand forged from mild steel and the grooves ground in with a dremel tool.
the time period that XVIIIb's were popular saw a lot of fancy decorative work on the swords. I haven't seen a guard that looks like that but it isn't so far fetched I'd call it fantasy. especially if you did something with the center block on the blade. do some research, look at pictures of XVIIIb swords in books and online to see what sort of angles and such are going on around that part of the guard. just don't leave it flat and square.
that little lump in the handle in the forward portion of the half nearest the guard would drive me nuts, just let that whole area be one nice continuous curve. the rest of it is pretty nice looking.
the XI-like sword.
ok first of all the big cosmetic no-no that I can't believe no one has yelled about yet: these things are suppose to be lenticular (curved like it has niku from one edge to the the other) there should be no ridge line going from the end of the fuller to the point. erase that line.
the flared shoulders are a little fantasy-esque in the way they are executed. historical flared shoulders are more subtle and the fuller doesn't tend to follow it. also flared shoulder swords from history are pretty rare. they do exist though so not a big deal. no need to make things harder than they need to be, that fuller is going to be a bugger, I'd just let it go in straight and not follow the flare.
your guard is pure fantasy. especially for such an early period sword. the center of the guard looks like a style 8 Oakeshott guard but the gem cuts are pure fantasy. if you like them fine but, you wouldn't catch me dead with a guard like that.
now even as a style 8 guard I would have a small problem: you don't see many Chevy or Mercedes symbols on Elizabethan era horse-drawn coaches. "Huh?" you say. what I mean is that guard is several hundred years too modern to be on that sword it would be like seeing an old west stage coach with a formula one spoiler on it: just weird and wrong. guards of this time tended to be very plain-Jane, I'm sorry to say, but many of them do look really good if executed right. look at ganhjalt or spike hilts.
lastly and again on the "why make more work" end of things why do you have the tang neck down like that inside the pommel? making that hole in the pommel is a bugger, youd be better off just letting it taper smoothly through it like you did on the XVIIIb tang.
OK real nuts and bolts time:
first Distal Taper. I've learned a lot from Gus over the years and I'm going to try to pass on some of what I have learned while hopefully getting it right. as as been stated already distal taper is how the thickness of the sword changes while the taper of the width is profile taper. Distal taper is the one that is most often gotten wrong because you can never see it in pictures of swords and it is extremely hard to really see even in person unless you have a good eye for it or calipers. people like to throw out numbers like 50% distal taper but that really doesn't tell you much. I could have Gus make three swords all with the exact same profile and fuller arrangement, and with the exact same pommel and guard and grip on them. all three could have 50% distal taper. they would look exactly the same in a picture but the moment you picked them up you would understand that they were three very different swords with very different uses. they would not weigh the same and their point of balance would be different too (because we are using the exact same pommels and guards).
the reason they are different is because they have three different types of distal taper.
Sword #1 is lighter than all of them its pob is closest to the guard, it moves the fastest and probably cuts the best. It is the most flexible of all three. it have CONCAVE distal taper. this means that while it loses 50% of its thickness from shoulder to tip it loses its thickness fast and near the hilt then it levels out as you get further out the blade. if you made a line graph of the thickness the line would curve downwards steeply right away and then level out and into a gentle slope for most of the blade. this type of taper puts most of the mass of the blade near the hand making it quick and responsive allowing for fast acceleration. this type of taper is often found on type X-XIV and is geared towards cutting.
Sword #2 is the heaviest and the stiffest of all three it is slower in the cut but has a powerful thrust that is hard to move offline and the stiffness of the blade supports hard thrusts well. it may be able to cut very well on soft targets due to the stiffness of the blade being forgiving of poor form, but this only happens when all other things are done well. if the blade is narrow and the bevels steep it is likely to be very unforgiving of bad edge alignment. this sword has CONVEX distal taper. its thickness graph would curve gently down after the guard for about two thirds of the blade and then drop quickly to 50% in the last third before the tip. this taper style is often found on types XV-XVIII it is geared towards thrusting and stiffness.
Sword #3 will feel more familiar to you as it will be similar in the way it moves to a katana. it has linear distal taper as do nearly all katana and its characteristics lie in the middle of the other two, seeking a balance between them. the graph of this swords thickness would be a straight diagonal line from guard to point losing the same amount of thickness every inch along the blade. some medieval swords did have this type of taper. it was popular on X, Xa, XI, and XIa that started out thinner than those with concave taper and would not taper as steeply as 50% with 30% being more likely. these swords would weigh very little (maybe 2 pounds flat) and tended to have long blades (34"-37") with POB as far our as 8 or 10" even, but they wouldn't be clunky and unwieldy.
fine tuning happens from here for sure and where exactly you place the curves of your distal taper make a huge difference in the handling, and harmonics. just a couple ounces makes all the world's difference depending on where it is taken from.
finally, let's talk about your furniture. the cross guards are where you have the most opportunity to play fancy and make them bigger and heavier as weight placed there makes a smaller difference than weight placed anywhere else. just don't go totally nuts and you should be fine.
the pommel is an entirely different story. everyone seems to get that a sword is a lever but they are wrong. a sword is TWO levers: one from the fulcrum that is the hilt's pivot point (not point of balance but where the pivot happens) out to the tip and another lever from the fulcrum of the hilt to the pommel. the longer the lever the slower it moves applies to BOTH these levers. a longer handle may seem like it offers more power for pushing but a shorter lever offers more speed of motion or torq which can often be the more powerful asset. notice we haven't mentioned the pommel yet? there's more too it all than just the weight and shape of the pommel. now your shorter "hilt" lever has a large (by comparison) weight on the end of it. think about the times in your life you've had some sort of stick with a weight at the end of it. how much heavier does that feel than if you just picked it up by the weight? right! small changes in weight make a big difference here. Rule of thumb on pommels: less is more. bigger pommels may look pretty but the smaller ones are often the ones that work best. a great many medieval pommels were hollow in part or in whole in order to be the right weight. so how do you know your pommel is the right weight? people will tell you to slap it and watch things wiggle. yeah that can tell you a lot but it is not the only thing to do and it is hard to teach someone without having them there with you to see. basically the place where the blade doesn't wiggle is your forward node or the sweet spot where the sword is supposed to cut best (well maybe- don't worry about the exceptions to this just know they are there) the more important thing to you right now is the hilt node and where it is. you want this node under your index or ring finger when you grip the sword. adjusting your pommel's weight can move these nodes. when in doubt go lighter.
there are several signs your pommel is too heavy:
with no power gently swing the sword one handed cut to full extension and let your body reach its natural full distance of travel and lock up (do this gently!) the sword should settle into your locked position smoothly. if it continues to try to drive the point on it is probably because your pommel is too heavy. if it is a lot too heavy you will actually feel new force generated from behind your hand pushing you. I call this pommel kick because the overweight pommel is kicking the sword at the end of the swing as it still have unspent momentum when the rest of the sword is ready to come to a rest.
again with no power step into a thrust and gently extend to full body extension. does the if you had your eyes closed would you know where the point is? would it be where you were thrusting at? did you have to use muscle to correct the trajectory of the point to go where you wanted it? a pommel that is slightly too heavy may give the sword a floaty, soft feeling. your point will want to continue in the direction it started and aiming it may feel like steering a boat. a pommel that is much too heavy may actually cause the point to drop as it kicks near the end of the movement. theres a lot of just feeling things to this part, when you get it right you will know. some swords are pretty tolerant of pommels weights and a wide range may work well giving you several different, interesting and good characteristics while other swords will want a pommel in a very narrow weight range.
that's all I can think of at the moment. a lot of this has been off my head and may be mus-interpreted or plain old wrong or hard to understand, but right now I feel pretty good about it all so I'm hitting submit. I reserve the right to be wrong and change my mind later.
