[David Evans]

Thank you Peter.

I'm increasingly convinced that Cutlers are a missing link. Rapiers are,as far as I can tell, finished by a cutler assembling a hilt, guard and pommel. Most cutlers would have had a number of rapiers pre assembled, for customers to try, and very possibly could have the option to re-balance the rapier with different pommels for a customer.

It would be nice to know more about the blade itself, shape and weight distribution factors should affect the size and weight of hilt fitted to get the PoB. As you say different factors may very well give the same feel in the hand to two different rapiers. The relative smallness of the deviation in PoB may indicate that that is the desired "area" in which PoB should fall for a rapier to give the control wanted over the point of the rapier

A half formed vague idea is floating around my head that blade dynamics aren't as important as they are for cutting swords. My thinking is forming around the fact that rapiers thrust. A round bar with a point on it won't move as well as a slim blade or a needle but is the shape of the blade related to the need to get a sharp point in the right place, or to the need to achieve a good depth of penetration. The aim, the whole 'point' of a Rapier is to stick the top 2" or 3" into someone. Cutting is somewhat of an optional extra. I don't know if I'll be able to finish that idea but I'll try!

A lot of my thinking is running around leverage and fulcrum theory. The PoB is chosen because it allows little moves at one end to make big moves at the other.

[David Evans]

Making a very crude assumption about mass distribution. That is to say. If half the weight of the rapier lies either side of the PoB then a crude estimation of the density of the blade can be made. This doesn't allow for that chunk of the blade on the other side of the PoB but it might just help ! The figures for 23 rapiers can be checked and calculated. This gives us a range of 0.407 qz per inch of blade to 0.70277 oz per inch of Blade. The average is 0.54811 oz per inch of blade. The deviation from that average is 0.0539 oz. The only fact that seems to pop out is that the longer the blade the lower the density. The lowest figure is for a rapier blade some 52" long. The largest figure is for a rapier with a blade some 36" long. I'm going to to crunch the figures I can using Gregory Stauf's linear blade density formulla to see what pops up.

[Aaron Schnatterly]

[Steve Grisetti]

[Alexi Goranov]

I personally feel that a sword (or a rapier) cannot be reduced to a 2D object and I will elaborate on that later. I also think that the fulcrum during motion is not the PoB but at the guard, where the hand is holding the sword. I may be wrong.

Peter has done a great job explaining the complexity of the blade geometry and the danger of reducing the blade to length, mass, and PoB. I cannot add anything to that but an example. I own a XVIIIb sword wich has 37" blade, weighs 3lb 8oz ,and has PoB of 5.25". I also own a XIIa with 37.25" inch blade, 3lb 11oz weight, and 5.25" PoB. On paper these are remarkably similar swords in terms of physical characteristics. What is not immediately obvious is the thikness of the blade and 3D blade geometry. The XVIIIb sword is almost 2x as thick as the XIIa at the guard and tappers distally and in profile faster than the XIIa, at least at some regions of the blade.

these difference make for a marked difference in feel when held and especially when set in motion. And I mean clear difference. The way these swords track and the way they fell and pull on the hand is very different. I would have never put these two swords in the same weight range based on their "feel" alone. The XVIIIb is faster even than a sword that weighs 3lb 4oz but has more mass towards the point (XIIIa that I own). For that matter, the heavier XIIa is easier to set in motion than the 7oz lighter XIIIa. Note that all three swords are performing the task they were intended, and the slower swords are not inferior, they have different purpose and different strong performance characteristics (the ability to cut tremendously well)

To me this is the genius of sword design.

I assume with rapiers it would be similar if not the same.

I have stopped looking at PoB and mass as means to judge a sword. these give very little useful information in terms of what this weapon will fell like in the hand and how it would perform.

This is not to devaluate the aspect of gathering data about the lengths, mass, and PoB of weapons. This is useful information, but it would be much more useful if blade geometry and pivot points were also available.

Alexi

[Angus Trim]

[Aaron Schnatterly]

[Angus Trim]

[Aaron Schnatterly]

Angus-

I'm not disagreeing with you (or Alexi) at all here - but you are both taking this out of the context my description was in. It's static, not dynamic, in David's situation. The dynamics of a sword are extremely complex. Nowhere in my posts here in this thread have I attempted to describe the handling dynamics of a sword. What I did attempt to do was use the laws of statics (the study of forces on / within a body or structure at rest) to show where the assumption was flawed. My point to the statement in my original post was that, at rest, there was no z-plane influence, and therefore was, effectively, a 2-D problem (not object - my verbage was imprecise). If you'd prefer, it's 3-D, but z is constant at 0. All this says is that the 3-D object isn't trying to fall over sideways while it see-saws up and down about it's fulcrum. David, in his post, made an assumption that half of the weight of the rapier was on the blade, past the PoB. I wasn't disputing a sword, but rather his assumption that half the weight was past the PoB.

I'm sorry if this has caused confusion. I agree 100% that how a sword handles is intensely complex, and that it mustn't be a crayon and scratch paper exercise. Point control, CP, harmonics, function... all of these things are vital. If you look at what I was really getting at, my statements actually support that the blade characteristics can't be so simplified.

[Angus Trim]

[Alexi Goranov]

[Aaron Schnatterly]

Alexi-

Exactly correct, and a point I never meant to contest. The way a blade handles is so intricate and tied to so, so many things... impossible to describe in a few simple lines of text or a couple of numbers.

On the point of the static example, you are also right - all three dimensions factor in to what the object "wants" to do. I hope I clarified that somewhat in my last post.

[David Evans]

Steve
Yes. Standard deviation is what I'm looking at. I should have said that.

Thank you for everyone's thoughts. What I'm trying to see is if there is some connection, some common feature that defines a well made rapier. The correlation between the mass, weight, shape and dynamics of a lump of shaped metal that says. " This is a Rapier ". The hardest part is always going to be expressing that connection, if there is one, in the simplest way possible.

What I'm thinking is that the swordmakers and cutlers between 1525 to 1575 came up with a way of making a sword who's main purpose was to thrust. The Sword Masters who studied, taught and used this sword either influenced it's shaping or came up with ways of using it's shape. From that it would appear, to me, the two then intertwined. The shape of a rapier influencing its use, the use of the rapier influencing its shape.

Sometimes You just have to ask a stupid question to learn :-)

[Craig Johnson]

Hello All

Sorry I have been out of touch for a while nasty flu bug had me down and out for over a week.

Good points by all and one needs to travel through these concepts to get to the more complex understanding of what is really taking place with these pieces.

David the compilation and digestion of those numbers is something I think most of us started with trying to pin down the objective you have stated. Hoping to find that correlation among the examples. The problem is the more one defines and categorizes the more difficult it becomes to truly say something of meaning about the sample. The problems are many but here are a couple that broke through my desire to come up with the rules and look more at the examples as individual pieces and try to understand each as its own unique answer to what makes a good rapier.

First off the items you are looking at may have some problems. The Wallace Collection for example is a great example of this. Many collectors in the late 19th C. had a tendency to adjust pieces to suit their taste. Many of the rapiers in the Wallace Collection have had their hilts and blades rearranged to better fit in the displays of the period. This is also an issue with pieces in other collections and US collections in particular. Some of this is difficult to ascertain unless one has the piece in hand, as many collections would prefer their items to not be of a composite nature.

The second issue is that many collectors of the late 19th C and early 20th C had a particular taste to their collecting and often dealt with one or two dealers or agents. As many of the modern museum collections had one or more of these collections as their core, often you will see a particular bias towards a type. Now, many curators have worked to broaden their collections to be more representative but one has to watch for this as a sampling bias when taking any group of published figures.

An issue that almost overwhelms all others in this type of discussion is that today when we look at this kind of sample of originals we must work from a ragtag collection of published and semi published results. It in no way even comes close to approaching the depth and breadth of types that existed even in a short time frame as you have discussed. My feeling is that in almost any time sample, especially 50 years or more, one can find a group of almost every type of sword/rapier from pure thrusters to wide bladed cutters and everything in between. Just because we focus on a particular group of items it does not necessarily mean they are representative of the time period in any specific region let alone Europe in general. I am not trying to dissuade you here from exploring your ideas just trying to put some context around them that I have found to be helpful.

As an example many of the rapiers I make are very specific in how they handle. I will have WMA participants who want a particular piece but when they try it out they are unhappy with how it moves. This is not the items fault as it is based on an example from the period. It works as someone from that period wanted it to work. It just means they are after something different wether what they want is historical or not that is a completely different question and in my humble opinion sometimes they will desire what they think is right over what the surviving examples demonstrate. But in most cases one can adjust the sword to their liking but it is then a different piece than the one originally replicated. I find this in rapiers far more than swords and the rapiers can demonstrate huge range in the examples out there from any given period and region. Just the fact wether it was meant for daily wear or as a side arm for military or official wear or as a traveling weapon will alter the weapon chosen greatly.

[Bill Grandy]

[David Evans]