Hello,

I began making a replacement hilt for a sword. Against my better judgment I just started forging away yesterday without a drawing or photos. Below is what I've come up with so far. The sword is 48" from tip to end of pommel. The cross guard I've made is 12.5" across. The cross guard will have side rings ultimately. In the shop sketches and mock-ups the width of this cross guard made sense to me, but having assembled these components, it is looking both beefy and probably too wide. The pommel is from the original sword, but will be replaced as well with a spiraling fluted mushroom shaped one. I was wondering how these proportions looked to others.

It does look overly wide, yes. One very general rule of thumb for good looking proportions is to make the guard roughly as wide as the handle is long, and this is quite significantly wider than that.

Other than that it looks good, though! :)

ummmm - just me, I suppose. The guard is just TOO wide. :(

Don't hold your punches. I have no qualms about setting this in the bin and trying again. You've both verified my suspicion and I will have another go tonight. The attached image is photoshopped to remove 1" from each end, matching the width of the guard to the overall length of the hilt.



Thanks,

-Adair

I did a very informal comparison for my own purposes a while back of a lot bastard and two-handed swords and I agree with the other posters that the current configuration looks "off" due the the cross being a bit too wide. Your photoshopped version looks a lot better and you could perhaps go a little bit shorter, but the 1" you removed looks way better compared to the grip length.

Good luck with the modifications.

Yes - new image is better. But given that blade? Something in me says "curve the guard forward". It could be the shape of the grip and pommel, but I just believe a forward curved guard would enhance this unit....

Yeah, that looks like it's in the right ballpark, to me. You could still take another half an inch off each end, but that's really up to personal preference and the sword's overall handling qualities at this point.

PS. Of course, if you curve it that also makes it effectively shorter, so take that into account! :)

Hm, I don´t know, I don´t think I would like a guard with a forward curve on this sword. But how about curving the overly wide guard into an S-shape, you know, horizontally? There are some Landsknecht greatswords that use this pattern, and I think it looks pretty nice.

Thanks again for the feedback. Since the guard is forged with a reverse taper (thicker on the ends, tapering towards the quillon block) I don't think it would work for a recurved or S-shaped guard. For such a guard I would have forged parallel sided arms. My intention was a straight guard with very slightly swelled ends, a side ring to one side and a forward swept ring meeting a quillon arm to the other.

Tonight I decided rather than starting over I would experiment with modifying this guard. I cut it down and filed more spiral flutes in. The terminals wound up much smaller since I had less stock to work with. I may just cut them off, shortening the guard even more. I also had less flare at the ends since I cut off the more dramatically flared section. Not sure if I will start over or not.

Update. Added side ring today.

-A.