An Austrian M1869 Uhlan Officers sabre.

Now I know where you've been hiding for three weeks, Dr Frankenstein. Wonderful as usual.





Hey, I got a great idea! Whatda ya say, I send you my set n 20 bucks and a new pair of rubber gloves? You can get them back to me for Christmas. I just luvs Christmas presents! (gollum)

I'd like to thank both of you gentlemen for your generous offers of financial aide in these hard times. Now, if I were to do the math, which I would't cause it is said math is hard, I would be working for about 10 $ cents per hour. Given that our regular gang of junkies what comes to our doors each morning asking for 1 Euro make about 10 Euro per head in 15 minutes flat, apart fom the appels and oranges and cigarettes and cups of really awfull coffee we buy them from the coffee lady who schleps around her cart on the market and sells her slop for 1 Euro 50 the cup, said math tells me that I'd be making even less than a standard junkie or homeless person does in this town.
Also I would like to ask you saintly generous gents to go stand in a bucket of ice water for four hours on a stretch cause that's how it feels at the moment in my attic cum workshop for a grand total of 40 $ cents paid per Paypal of course so I have to wait for weeks to get at this virtual treassure? No? I thought so. You lazy bunch of softies and anarchic Trotsky loving Stalinist bearded cheese ball munchin' hippies prefer the comfort of your airco offices while figuring out schemas to squeeze the last drop of life out of this hard working common worker while a manicure lady from lands far away hunkers under your desk doing your toe nails.
Revolution I say! To the guillotines!! :)

As to testing:

I think you may be refering to something like the British proof test.
Those tests were done at the forge level and had nothing per se to do with how a sabre holds up under real life conditions.
New models were given to some units of each branch of Cavalry. Cuirassiers, Dragoons and Uhlans had different requirements apart from the rivalry between said branches where the Cuirassiers considered themselves as the ,, Queen of the battle field'' who wanted the biggest and the longest of whatever, which is interesting from a psychiatric and psychological point of view if you are into that kind of thing, the Dragoons who were more into good working guns anyway and the Uhlans who had their lances to work with and thought the sabre to be a secondairy weapon which could be in the way most of the times. The yearly manouvres and war games were a good proving ground also as these were done, as far as I know in the German speaking community at least, on a truely massive scale. The new models were drilled with, had to endure the daily wear and tear and troopers had a free hand in trying to find faults. The reports went up to the bureaucrats who shoved them under the piles of other papers in order to protect various (br)$emprinies higher up, so it could take years for the complaints to filter through to somebody who could really do something about them and wanted to take the risk of borking his career.
Another thing is the way all projects work. Say one wants a new model of sabre of whatever.
A budget is made and stuff ordered. Really big loads of stuff as a Solingen forge could make 2000 sabres per week. Half way and this was already taken into account at the beginning (!), reports come in that said stuff does not work too good and that they are way over budget. The common bureaucratic response is: Well, we have already invested so much time, effort and money, if we stop now all of this will be wasted. So we have to keep going. Blah, blah, blah. It is the oldest trick in the bureaucratic playbook. So cities get saddled with gigantic and killingly expensive projects that they cannot pay for and that don't work and the populace doesn't need or want in the first place, if we translate the above to our more modern realms.
Sorry that I am a bit long winded, but the cosmically generous offers made by the two of you really got my mojo working. :)

Very early in my collecting mania I won an ebay British guards saber from some dealer in England. 800.00 USD. Confident in the manners of the British, I sent the saber directly to Sussex Swords and asked for an estimate for a few problems. Their answer was delayed twice due to "summer holiday". They ran me past the old ebay six week deadline to report a problem.

Got an email about 9 weeks into the process (which I will translate into American English).

Dear moron. Got some bad news dickweed: you bought a fake. It isn't just a fake its a SLO fake. But never fear; we here at Sussex can remake this piece of sh it into one of the nicest pieces of sh it in all of hillbilly heaven. It will cost you 2400.00 USD to do so, but for that we will stamp our mark on the da mn thing in eight different places so you can show the other morons you're movin to the east side.

Oh: and a shame we burned up your claim date so you can't recover your losses.

Let us know if you want to take this to the next level of pain and abuse.

Cheers

I thanked them for the lesson in sword trade. Don't bother sending me the piece of sh it. Dispose of it as you see fit. Shove it up your aspidistra if you please.

I was distressed to hear that Sussex sword went tits up about a year later.  (Pigs a ss I was.)

Visions of yourself laboring the thousand stairs,up to your laboratory. Putting on your Arctic parka and mucklucs. Then entering the portal of hell, to work for hours under a large magnifying glass with a tinsey weensy roll of sand paper.  Pay you what you deserve? Can't afford that. Will just have to do my own scraping, inferior as it might be.

An interesting story. Just getting around to reading it, been a bit under the weather. Hhmmm, “to the cows came home”, been decades since I’ve heard that one.

You guys are killin’ me!!

(The hillbilly thing hit a bit too close to home, tho.)

🤣