[P Ullrich]

This project started with a bare blade from Albion, type X, and fitting purchased from Mr. Pikula years ago. The bare blade is high quality at a good price but you get a very unfinished object requiring lots of grinding for steel removal and blade geometry formation. The blade edge arrives very thick and you have to grind down all that steel without gouging the edge or the fuller lines. I have a little 2 x 42 belt grinder with steel grinding belts for the initial heavy work. I feel lucky to not have buzzed a notch out of the blade or fuller. Then I moved to 120 and 240 grit stones that you can see in a pic for the final stock removal. The fuller also needed a lot of work, arriving with big ridge lines and a few divets so deep from something in production that I couldn't remove them entirely. For the fuller shaping and sanding I made a wood block to nestle in and then placed sand paper over that.

Once the sword was built I followed a few tutorials for the scabbard. There are inner layers of wood slats with felt lining.

For the leather I used light deerskin. You can see a pic with one of my leather tools, a deer rib with notches and edges for marking the leather and burnishing edges. I copied a Christian Fletcher design for the baldric.

I elected to use a friction fit system for the suspension instead of rivets or stitching. Using techniques comparable to things seen in scandi knife cover builds. The parts hold together with no slippage. You can see I gave a try at design carving in the leather.

I hope you like it!

[Michael Sandoval]

Really impressive work! You were lucky to get Michael Pikula fittings before he retired.

Love to see more shots of the blade! Have you done a lot of this type of work before?

Congratulations again on a brilliant DIY job—

[P Ullrich]