Findlithui, If I may I will answer the question about the liners.
Most steel scabbards of the period have them.
The way it works is:
The steel scabbard has a throat piece that fits in the throat and is held in place by two little screws.
The throat piece has two spring steel flaps that grip the blade just under the guard.
Between these flaps and the inside scabbard wall there is a little space where the end of the wood liners go into.
This space being very narrow makes for the wood liners at that point to be very thin.
After the throat piece there is more room so they will meassure about 1mm thick all the way down.
The wood liners are no more than two separate pieces of thin wood that rest freely inside the scabbard and can be taken out at will when the metal throat piece that holds them in place and separates them, is removed for cleaning.
So, you have two, thin pieces of wood in the shape of the blade.
The thickness correspondents with the veneer of the period.
This was hand cut and is mostly about 1mm thick. So see them as two pieces of poplar or beech veneer.
I will upload some pictures if you want, to make things more clear.
What happens is that the pieces of the liners between the spring steel flaps are less and sometimes much less than 1mm thick. This is the place where water, crud and stuff enters the scabbard and somehow gets behind the flaps, right at the place where there is no air circulation to speak of. The liners will start to rot there, since the rest of them is protected with the oil of the blade, more or less.
I think that every now and then the armourer would replace the liners.
When things with the liners go wrong, most people will just force the blade in and this is the result of that:
Top quality garden soil!
This is the throat piece of a Degen. No flaps but a one piece blade holder.
Principle is the same though. The veneer would have been much thinner here, like paper thin.
That is why the liners are gone with this one.
All my other sabres have the liners but the screws are stuck and I do not want to bust those.
I hope this will clear things anyway.