Posts: 350 Location: Pacific Palisades, California
Mon 05 Mar, 2012 6:31 pm
Darksword's 1812 Parrying Dagger
Hello all.
Here is some information, much of which I also posted at the SFI Forum in a thread concerning Darksword Armory's quality. It's obvious that I have now reached a certain level of, well, frustration with Darksword Armory. While not a complete novice or rookie in collecting, I do have some things to learn. My recent interaction with Darksword products has been illuminating. I hope my language is not too strong for the moderators here.
As I stated in my previous post concerning The Norman sword from Darksword, I was expecting delivery of their Parrying Dagger 1812, their version of a main-guache, see:
http://www.darksword-armory.com/medieval-daggers/. It has arrived and this is what I can tell you. I'll try to upload some pictures later.
- There are multiple rusted areas; at the end where the wire wrapping meets the guard, on both sides of the upper blade / ricasso, and in multiple areas where major scratches have occurred. One could almost get the impression by the rust contrast that the knife is chrome plated, I'm not claiming it is, but these blemishes do jump out.
- The wood grip underneath the wire wrap is blatantly visible where the wire wrap meets the guard / quillons. The wire wrap appears incomplete, in fact it is incomplete. Perhaps a turkshead or some sort of collar would have been helpful.
- And the worst part. The ring (which is perhaps too thin) is soldered to the guard, well, very poorly. Solder is smeared broadly all over the areas of attachment and there are large lumps of solder on both sides of the attachment points, there was no post soldering clean-up. And again, rust is clearly visible at both of the ring's connecting points
- The included scabbard, while not unattractive, isn't close to fitting the dagger. It's about 1/4 inch too wide, and a good 1 1/2 inch too long. The dagger simply flops around inside the scabbard.
- Most of the blade isn't bad, there are some scratches which I could remove as I did with partial success on their Norman sword. The dagger design is attractive, I generally like the main-guache variety of dagger, especially this dagger as shown in the photo displayed at DSA's website. This dagger does feel sturdy, nothing rattles or wobbles. It's the poor execution of assembly and the general lack of quality control that is obvious.
All in all, to this collector, Darksword Armory has proven to be very disappointing and I cannot recommended them until some very obvious quality control problems are addressed.
There will be additional discussion points in another email to Darksword.
Thanks, Jon