I find this thread extremely interesting! I must ask, however, a question. In particular as someone very interested in picking up Mr. Johnsson's book.

Does his book have all the required information for the swords so that one could input the parameters into your calculator and compare historical examples, to each other and/or production swords?

It sounds like pivot points in particular are difficult to ascertain, yet they also seem to be required to use your software.

There is a section near the start of the catalogue which includes graphs for most of the swords present. These are fully detailed, with mass curves, agility cones, and pivot points etc.

Do note however, that while the graphs are included as well as some numerical output (mass and percentage at the blade node), there is no table of input data that you could just enter into the tool. This was ommited for two reasons, the first was space constraints and the second was that at the publication time, the tool was not available yet.

However, you have the possibility of measuring on the sword drawings again. They are all to 1/12th scale. On these you have pivot points, nodes and everything you need.

Regards,

Even hand-held, the pendulum test is more accurate IME.

I use the version without a stopwatch. Just do it side-by-side with a weight on a string (a golf ball is good, because it's heavy enough so that the string is very light in comparison, small enough, and won't damage the blade). Change the length of the string until the periods are the same. Place the pendulum (weight on string) against sword, places where the sword and string were held together, and the weight is at the pivot point.

Hello Timo,

I've found hand-held pendulum hard to do reliably. There is a lot of dampening and I can't get a lot of oscillations, so precision is limited.

But I've been told the same about the waggle test by others, so in the end... Let everyone pick their favourite!

Regards,

Does anyone have a database of various well-known swords they would care to share?
I have computed the two training (long)swords I own, and they show a difference which is borne out in the feel of handling, but I'd really like to see how they compare with a variety of others...

Maybe there could be a dropbox of databases!

Expanding the dataset available is the next goal, now that the tool gives an easier way to exploit measurements.

My own public database is here, but this is just my collection of modern swords. I know several other persons have started to assemble databases, but the most comprehensive and trustable is in book form right now, in the catalogue.

The problem is that such data is not always free to go public (some museums are picky about this, I've heard), and if the person measuring is also a swordsmith - as is often the case, it can be seen as a sort of 'trade secret' for the conception of historical swords. These are the main reason why big, comprehensive datasets are hard to come by. The book was a big step in that regard.

As the developer of the online tool, I was fine with providing computation, but did not want to deal with the hassle of managing and maintaining a central database for everyone. Privacy and reliability concerns are primordial in this task if one wants to do it right, and this is not my area of expertise at all. It also takes more time than I have available right now... This is why the data is quite scattered right now.

I expect that the availability of data will expand in the future, however slowly. I am also analyzing the data I have access to but can't make public, and this might eventually be reflected in the tool, making it more useful even without data to compare with.

Regards,

Vincent, if you would be so kind, can you explain what all of the abbreviations are in the data file? For example, if rather than autoloading the data I were to work backwards and input values in the calculator by hand, which are which?

I'm getting most of them. Many like "CoG" are pretty obvious, or I can infer them from the order they appear in the data file. But I'm definitely not figuring them all, and I'd like to be able to. It really helps me visualize what's going on better that way, taking time to input by hand.