Usually I make my quillons out of 1/4" stock, and then I use the end of the quillon itself as the inside/shoulder of the quillon block. In this case I built the quillon block itself, then drilled holes to help me center and align the quillons. There's probably a structural advantage to the holes in this case, but its welded all the way around, so i think its pretty secure regardless. I'm attaching some photos of a couple different guards at this stage...I think that will make it clearer.

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very helpful, thank you!

I thought I'd post some process shots as this particular rapier pokes along towards completion. I'm currently at a pausing point while I wait for a piece of solid nickel to show up so I can experiment with nickel plating etched design lines. I'm hopeful that this will get me a nice bright, corrosion resistant silver "line" while allowing me to use chemical blue on the "ground". We'll see what happens.

In some of these photos you can see the parts painted with a black acrylic resist and then the design scraped off. I use a sharpened brass rod held in a drafting pencil. Some of it looks messy, but that's mostly silver paint pen that I use to touch up mistakes. Visually confusing, but they don't seem to make fine tip paint pens in black.....

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