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Martin Kallander wrote:
Glen A Cleeton wrote:
19th century

An Ames m1832 (copy of the French 1816) and an early Ames 1840s militia sword

Cheers
GC


Thank you, The first one is a very nice blade! I think something went wrong because the second image is a dagger with a fuller (although that is an interesting and unusual thing in and of itself)


The hidden image is an m1832 foot artillery sword.

The other, the militia sword is a style that became popular with US fraternal orders but these were carried into the US civil war of the 1860s.
[ Linked Image ]
[ Linked Image ]
from the Time Life books

A couple of these below are not lenticular blades.

[ Linked Image ]
Cheers
GC
Nathan Robinson wrote:
Lenticular cross-section blades can have fullers. Just to be clear, you don't want to see those, right?


The thought occurs; A cross-section is the base plane of a blade and lenticular means a shape that is convex on two mirrored sides. With this in mind, a blade with one central fuller is not a lenticular sword, it just isn't. You can make the case for some swords with double or more fullers on each side being lenticular since a pattern is established on those where if you look past the fullers, the sword is lenticular. With single fullered blades however, not only is this not the case, but in the forging process these swords are closer to hexagonal cross sectioned blades before the fuller is made. You cannot say it would be lenticular if the fuller wasn't there, because it wouldn't. And that is entirely beside the fact that the fuller is in fact there and affects the shape of the cross section to the point that it is not lenticular. Lenticular swords cannot have fullers by definition.
Dear Martin,

I'm afraid I'd have to disagree.

Note, for example, that the Ames Model 1832 short sword that Glen posted is lenticular where fullers are not present: by the guard, above the double-fullered section of the blade; between the double-fullered and single-fullered sections; and below the single-fullered section, at the tip. I know that the sword itself isn't relevant to your request in this thread because you specified that you are not interested in short swords, but it's a good illustration of the matter at hand.

Addressing your other argument, you say that a single-fullered sword must be of its nature hexagonal, not lenticular. But this need not be true if the blade's longitudinal sections between the edges of the fuller and the edges of the blade (I avoid the term "flats" for obvious reasons) are convexly curved. If they are flat, then yes, the sword is fundamentally hexagonal; but I don't think that it's accurate to say that "in the forging process these swords are closer to hexagonal cross sectioned". As an example, a blade could be forged with a lenticular cross-section before the fuller is either forged or ground (or forged and ground) in. I don't think that you can use the shape of the blade during forging as a criterion anyway, because at some point it's very likely to be oblong in cross-section. That doesn't affect the blade's final cross-section, but is a more or less unavoidable artifact of the forging process: A bar is drawn out from a billet, or blanks are cut from a matrix. No sword can be said to have a particular cross-section before it's finished, because both forging and grinding are part of the production process for all traditional swords. (One might choose to say that swords shaped entirely by grinding don't conform to this rule, but those would be rare historically; and I'd disagree with that assertion anyway, as follows.) There are some situations in which a sword's cross-section may change after its initial manufacture, but then I think that we have to talk about the sword as it was first made and as it was later altered. The sword is not somehow both or neither, nor would it be "not really" of the final cross-section merely because at some point it had been of a different cross-section. It is what it is at the time that it's examined.

These arguments, of course, omit cases of multiple cross-sections in the same blade, which are certainly possible. But in such cases, we can only talk about the cross-sections at particular locations on the blade, echoing the argument above.

I hope this proves helpful.

Best,

Mark Millman
Lenticular cross-sectioned blades can have fullers, just as diamond cross-sectioned, or hexagonal cross-sectioned swords can.
I'd say that, at least for early medieval swords (up to Type XIII), the blade between the end of the fuller and the tip is generally lenticular. It'd therefore make sense to consider the rest of the blade lenticular as well, before any fullering, that is.
Paul Hansen wrote:
I'd say that, at least for early medieval swords (up to Type XIII), the blade between the end of the fuller and the tip is generally lenticular. It'd therefore make sense to consider the rest of the blade lenticular as well, before any fullering, that is.


Exactly.
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