Can anyone tell me anything about Chevalier D'Auvergne? I hear that they have some guards and pommels for sale on their site http://www.chevalierdauvergne.com/. Has anyone bought some of their wares and could tell me what kind of quality, ease of communication, and turn-around time for delivery to the United States are?

I can't say anything about their shipments to USA, since I live in Europe. I have bought some of their wares. The basic medieval sword guards are good enough, but you have to be aware that you might have to do quite a bit of filing to fit your blade in them. I have their small curved medieval handguard and I am thinking about fitting it to a Hanwei-Tinker single hand blade. The small brass pommels are good for smallswords. Medieval pommels have the standard 6 mm thread, so turning of the pommel can be a problem if you dont use epoxy or braze the the pommel in place, after which it is of course permanently fixed.

I think both the guards and pommels are good enough, nothing fancy. If you are willing to do some filing they work as a project material. I have not seen their rapier guards and I am curious about their quality, so if anyone has experience about them please comment.

Their theatrical fencing blades dont usually have much taper, so they can be a bit point-heavy to my knowledge. I have the Lafontaine -blade and the the 1882 sabre blade. The sabre had a 5 mm rod tang! I cut the stronger part of the tang towards the point quite a lof, luckily the blade is quite long. The sabre blade had good taper. Wonder why they could not make it right in the first place?

Well, I saw their pricelist... Why should I waste money on expensive replicas, when at this price you can get original period items? I'm not talking about medieval stuff, but 19th century military swords and sabers. If you are lucky you can find on ebay excellent quality original austro-hungarian or prussian military swords in this price range, but be aware of cheap chinese fakes.