[Craig Peters]

A while back I purchased one of the rusty antiqued swords from Albion's moat sale, a Castellan. After hours and hours of removing rust with sand paper, I got the sword to the point where it was (largely) cleaned. After some time, I found a guy who could made a wood grip for it, and I just needed to do a grip wrap for it. Although there are a bunch of stores not far from where I live selling leather, none of them seemed to have vegetable tanned calf skin.

As a quick compromise, I bought some green cord and wrapped the grip myself. While totally functional, the grip was a bit guady, and because I didn't glue it properly, it would slip open a bit in places, revealing the wood underneath. I used the sword like this for about a year.

Recently, a custom leather work store opened up nearby. I decided to see if they could do a re-grip for me, and they said yes, although they had unsurprisingly never done a sword grip before. I decided to change the grip colour to black, the nearly ubiquitous colour of the 15th century. I decided that I wanted to have a rain guard made for it as well. Hector's thread on the Cluny gave excellent close-ups of its rain guard which served as a valuable point of reference.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. The black grip gives the sword a visual starkness, and the rain guard is the first I've had on a sword.

[Eric W. Norenberg]

Craig that looks really good. Any chance we can press you for a full length shot? I'm curious about the blade. I love the look of something polished back from the point of very rusty/crusty.

[Mike Jia]

Very nice improvement Craig

[Craig Peters]

Mike can comment with greater authority than most, since he has seen the original grip in person.