A type H design
Aug 24, 2021 21:52:45 GMT
Post by durinnmcfurren on Aug 24, 2021 21:52:45 GMT
In case it helps anyone else, I made a sort of generic type H viking sword design. Yes, I am aware that I marked the thickness of the guard as 3.4 cm in one place and 3.3 cm in another. Obviously, handmade swords won't be precise, but yeah, I meant it to be 3.4. The guards could be as thick as 3.6 cm as per Petersen. The thinnest that I have seen was still 2.96 cm wide. The lower guard should be thicker than the upper guard.
The thing that I notice most reproductions screw up fairly consistently: they made the upper and lower guards too thin! These type H swords had BEEFY guards. The other error I notice is a tendency to make the pommel cap on the lower guard too tall compared to the width or something. I have seen swords that sell for well over $1000 that have this error.
You might worry this makes for a heavy sword. Well, yes. The type H is not one of the lighter swords. Especially not with a wide blade. These won't be 1100 g viking swords like some people like to talk about! But I have seen historical examples that weighed in at 1.4 to 1.8 kg. So that is fine. Also if you want it lighter, you can scale it down a little bit. I've seen upper guards with widths from 7.7 cm (on JPO 2249, p. 52 of Peirce) up to 10.5 cm or so (K-22 in the Netherlands, dimensions given in a paper by Ypey), and lower guards starting at 7.2 cm up to maybe 8.5 ish or more (based on looking at photographs and using geometry to calculate them). Of course, the blade can be made less wide, and the fuller can be expanded up to 3 cm and still be historically accurate. All those things would help reduce weight. But if you really want a light sword, probably a different Petersen type would be the way to go.
If anyone wants one of these, I've given Purna plenty of practice with them (a smaller and a larger version). And he would probably love to make one for someone who is less exact and OCD about their custom swords than I am!
It should be noticed that most historical swords of this type did have a copper, silver, or tin veneer put on using fine wires hammered into grooves on the surface. Often, they would use different colors to make geometric patterns.
An example of the decoration:
Finally, the original K-22 described by Ypey.
EDIT: You can find Ypey's paper on this sword here. Go down to pages 297-301 and click that link to get the paper itself (in Dutch).