I recently forged such an octagonal blade and filed it until my sweat melted the ice around my feet. OK it is not pointy enough but for my first try I am satisfied...it´s a workpiece, have to put the angle into the blade-shoulders and polish the blade and and and and...I am too lazy for this project at the moment..

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Christian,

Thanks for more pictures of that sword. One of the fine ones :)

Your blade looks like one of those within the type that has less profile taper. I see nothing wrong with the shape. Some are more pointy looking, others are like your blade. If your blade is between 71 and 78 cm, it looks to fit right in wit the sub type 1 (width at the base 3.6 - 5 cm). Some of these do not have such strongly tapering blades and they go with long tangs, just like your blade.

Looking forward to see this one finished!

Christian, I think your new sword blade can be used as a model for Arminius' sword. Just design a handle like the one held by the statue and I suggest you don't have to use copper plates to create this sword. ;)

[quote="Christian Böhling"]

Peter Johnsson wrote:

If it is of any interest, I can post the interim results :)

By all means, do it! It will only enhance this already extremely informative thread.

On surface finish:
It is a tricky one as the surface today may have gone through several transformations.

Whenever an original is in pretty pristine condition, the surface to me looks to have been highly finished with well defined lines. No clear scratch or file marks. I imagine the final finish was achieved with stones, hand held or rotary-I don´t know. I don´t know of any roman age find of rotary grinding stones. I have not heard of any excavations showing sites of sword manufacture either.
Files were known tools, to my understanding. Stones have been used for grinding and polishing since dawn of time as has powdered polishing compound. Often the trick is to add some lubricant, like oil or fat and to find a handy way to apply the grit.

To be safe, a hand held stone seems reasonable for coarser finish. You can use a small stone in the hand, or move the sword on a stationary one.
Another possibility for finish is to use wood backed leather with fat and or oil and emery powder (can be shaped into profiles for groves and fullers). I use 600 or 800 grit and leather with oil for hand rubbing my own sword blades. It gives a smooth and satiny polish without the scoring scratch marks of emery paper.

Below an attachment as example (completely wrong time period! but you get an idea of the finish possible). This finish is completely possible with the tools and materials at hand in the iron age and was largely finished with just those methods I described above.

EDIT: perhaps more to the point, below is attached a close up of the edge of a roman sword where the original surface has been preserved between a scattering of small blisters of rust. Perhaps it is difficult to make out, but the surface gave an impression of a satiny, glossy quality. Perhaps not quite mirror finish, but smooth and without any rough scoring. You can see the original metal showing between dark patina.

EDIT2: Saying all this about the possible level of finish, I do not think swords were uniformly done to that level. As we see evidence for large scale production, but perhaps organized as multitude of cottage industries, it is reasonable that some level was the accepted norm. As with production in later times, I would expect that there were patches of rough marks showing here and there in some cases. This is just speculation. There is not that much surviving today with original surface still showing....
Grinding and filing is a natural part of sword production. At some point in work you turn from plastic forming to stock removal. This is normally done in preparation for heat treat and afterwards to get final finish and sharpness. Stones would have been natural and straight forward tools for this. How high grit was used will remain a bit speculative of course. We know that many blades were pattern welded. This demands a certain level of surface finish and possibly also etching. Based on this it is not reasonable to think that rough file marks were the accepted norm as final finish when the pattern demands a finer surface. A rough filed surface is also much more vulnerable for rusting.

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Christian Böhling wrote:
"If it is of any interest, I can post the interim results "

Please do! To echo Artis' comment, there are a lot of us following this discussion by you gentlemen. Thank you all!

Thanks for this good insight-view in polishing and grinding methods, I hope that helps some people to see, how intensive the finishing of a good blade can be, since some people tend to think, only a forged blade is a good one, meaning, that the process of forgery is the hardest work, and finishing is easy by just going over the blade with a machine-polisher and that´s all. To me (as I just make mono-steel-blades) the finishing has always been the real main part of my work when I just count the hours I spend on this! So people who never done a sword can imagin how labor-intensive this kind of work is!

But I see there was a ittle misunderstanding in the intention of my question, probably caused by my deficient english:

My thoughts concerned on the question, how the smiths replicable produced the octagonal shape in some Vimose-Illerup blades and if the originals when observed through a microscope tells us something about the tools used for that.
I searched for traces of finishing tools but the restauration and the corrosion of the outermost surface hindered such a research or observation to me. There were some traces of files on some lanceheads we found in Kalkriese our restaurator saw clearly throgh the binocular microscope kind of "overwashed" by polishing probably with the technique you described.

It would be interesting to find out, if that, what makes us today stunning when looking at the japanese traditional finishing process, would be in some degree also to suggest for the european blade "industry".

For my Illerup blade I will try to leave out the modern machines and try by hand, but I think I will stop at a degree, when like you say, not a mirror finish is reached, but an acceptable state of a smooth surface.

BTW: I tried to form such an octagonal surface by forging - was possible (even if not perfectly done by my poor hands), but while grinding, the structure reached by forging was automatically removed again, I can´t say if it was less work then to grind compared to grind-only starting with a flat forged blade.

For this blade I started to handforge a diamant cross-section, then filed the broad side edges and after that I filed the octagonal. When I now remove the traces of filing with a stone and after it polish it, I can imagin how long it took to produce such a blade and this makes me stunning about the total number of blades found in the bog-finds!!

But I agree to you concerning the grind-cottages (in Solingen - ok a very much later industry - have been hundreds of "grind-cottages" wher people only were employed with finishing blades)

I suggest a more "indutry"-like blade production in roman times. That´s the difference to me today trying to do all from a block of steel to the finished blade, counting all the hours ;) calling the sword "Balmung" after that ;) just kidding...

A very fine but mass producing proto-industry.

To my opinion the understanding of the warfare either of the Germanics or the Romans has to start with the try to understand this background, utilization of resources, international devision of labor and developement of trade, time-scales for production processes and so on. And we can start with only a single blade.

Hope Petr will some day start his project and will use traditional forge welding techniques. I try it with my mono-steel (which was also common if I understood you right).

Hello! not to hijack the thread but i made little tuto on this, its in czech but pictures are selfexplanatory:
http://skjaldborg.cz/skjbook.htm