[Leo Todeschini]

Keep at it Daniel, just accept in your mind it is going to take ages and your fingers will hurt and you will be in the right mindset. Spring steel is fine if you treat it hard.

I finally got up the courage to start and so here we go.

I started on the non-rune side of the blade with the cross hatching near the tip and I went for a silver and brass wire combination. The grooves were hammered in using a small cold chisel with a 2mm edge and then undercut with the same chisel. I was not very happy with the way it cut and later changed the tip profile from a cold chisel to a true 'chisel grind' to allow me to undercut without smudging the edges of the cut too much.

The two long grooves were then cut in and the bottom faced before undercutting the edges and then I went on to cut the main crosshatching. I was then going to lay in the long twin wires and then go back to the shorter cross hatches, but I decided to change the order. By laying in the crosses first I will have to go back and trim off the ends of the wires later, but somehow it felt like the right order. I was also going to punch the triangles and squares in at this stage, but again I changed my mind as I worked the piece and will now finish the inlaid cross hatched wires, then do the squares and triangles and then finish with the paired wires. In-between each stage there will be some clean up so we can start to get an idea of the look of the piece.

Quite why I have changed the order is a little hard to concisely explain, but really it is just that as I see how the metal moves and behaves (this blade has been made from ore so I am not very familiar with it) I have changed my mind. Really it is just a case of one step not messing up the previous nor causing issues for the next step.

I am pleased with the progress and the wires have gone in well and seem secure at this stage.

Tod

[Leo Todeschini]

I finished laying in the crosses and then the long twin wire borders and everything is looking pretty good. I then hammered in the triangles for the small copper inserts which upset the twin wires as you can see.

So I think we can assume that I got the order wrong. Damn. I have laid in the copper triangles and will now pick out the twin wires, clean up the trough and lay new ones back in, but before doing that I will lay in the silver squares in the centre of the cross hatching.

it is slowly getting there.

The dots punched in the blade are just markers for where the other triangles will go.

Tod

[Eric McHugh]

Leo, nice work. I appreciate your desire to get it right! Sometimes it is hard to break the code on how ancient craftsmen did things.

[Jeremy V. Krause]

This is really coming together Tod!

It looks great and thanks so much for showing your progress. I am really enjoying following along on what is sure to be one of- if not the finest piece in my collection.

[Leo Todeschini]

Thanks Eric, I appreciate it and good to see you are up and running again. In my early days you were a legend people talked about and now you are resurrected. Pretty sure I have hilted a couple of your seax blades in my time.

Jeremy Krause wrote

[Fabrice Cognot]

Very cool, Todd.

Yeah, things like that happen - and there's no right time for that.

Looking forward to seeing the next steps.

[Leo Todeschini]

Thanks Fab.

So here are the updated pictures. It started with me having laid in the copper into the triangles and then having punched the squares for the silver. Both of these required punches to be made and these had to be made right and cold hammering into metal onto an anvil is punishing for a small punch, though thankfully the wrought iron of the blade is soft so that helps a lot.

Once the squares were in I made silver spheres out of some pure silver scrap I had. This is easily done by clipping a small amount of silver off and putting it on a brick and hitting it with a torch. It will suddenly reticulate and contract into a sphere, note that the silver is still bright, showing it is pure and not alloyed.

These are then placed into the squares, which have of course been undercut, and hammered home. Once these were all in, I unpicked all the previous wire work, made sure all the undercuts were still there and then laid all the wires in again. In retrospect I should have assumed that the major disturbance created by the shaped punches would do this, but I didn't.

A friend mentioned this over the weekend and described this fiasco as a mistake. I am torn a little on whether this is a mistake or not. In the classic sense I didn't want this to happen and so yes it is a mistake, on the other hand to use an exploring metaphor, when you are sailing in uncharted waters, it is inevitable that sometimes what you thought was a channel between two islands ends up being a river and so to a dead end.

Anyway the last pictures are on the whole inlay in situ, and then to the grind back to flat.

By the time I had finished it was too dark for good pictures, but I hope these will suffice for the moment.

Tod

[Leo Todeschini]

And the last few pictures...

Tod

[Eric McHugh]

Nice work Leo!

[Jeremy V. Krause]

Congratulations on getting the first side done Tod. a hearty BRAVO to you!

Now Tod and I want to turn to the collective knowledge of the community here before deciding on specifics around the handle. Does anyone know of any intact, or relatively intact seax handles from the period?

I believe we plan on using box wood but are unsure as to what type of decorations to use as a completely plain handle might not look quite right given the extensive amount of inlay on the blade. Were ferules being used during this period (c.e. 900)?

What expert feedback can folks provide as I really want to produce a complete piece staying as close to period examples as possible. I am not a real fan of kind of "guessing" what would have been used or in just making decorative choices on what looks "right".

[Tim Lison]

One word: WOW!

[Patrick De Block]

I am aghast.

[Julien M]

Tod & Owen, what a team! This will be something to behold for sure.
I can only imagine how one must feel before taking the first chisel cut on such an exquisite pattern welded blade, and you make this look as easy as a walk in the park Tod.

Looking forward to see this finished (and to see what you come up with next of course , and hopefully soon! )

Cheers,

J

[Jeroen Zuiderwijk]

[Eric McHugh]

Hi Leo,

Here are my two cents. First, I apologize for the bad picture. I was without a good camera when I took this. Second, I'm sure that Tim will not want the same grip, so I am not suggesting that you do anything like this, but the guard shape is somewhat common.



You could do something similar to give the wood something to butt up against. The more I think about seaxes the more I think they would have put leather over them. It just makes sense to me. I mean why go to all the trouble of inlaying a blade then sticking a clunky piece of wood on it.

When I did this grip, I was mainly trying to get creative with what could have been. Truthfully, it is more of a sword hilt shape than a seax, but I was tired of the same old chunk of wood treatment that was very popular with reenactors.

In the British Museum there is a seax I think is in the same area as the Seax of Beag. I'm sure you know the one I am talking about. It has a wonderful silver rivet block. You could consider putting a small guard piece on it and then have a butt piece with a rivet block that is inspired from that piece. Then a wood core with a leather wrap...perhaps even with stitching. Please realize I am just offering suggestions...feel free to tell me to mind my own business.

[Jeroen Zuiderwijk]

Regarding ferrules, bolsters etc. Although they are pretty much non existent on surviving broken back style (long)saxes, they do show up on artwork for shorter broken back saxes at least:

[Ralph Grinly]

I've totally no knowledge of 'original" handles for these weapons, but..given the design of the inlays, maybe some form of "chip carving" might complement the blade ? Honestly, I'm not even sure IF "chip carving" was a technique actually used in the period, but it's a possibility ?

[Leo Todeschini]

Thanks for the input guys and a very interesting post with the handle coming down onto the blade, courtesy of Jeroen.


I find it strange that at the point of highest stress, any question of it breaking, would be removed by using a ferrule and yet it seems they did, but very rarely. The engineer in me says that what this means is that the glue bonded well enough that it effectively turned the wood and metal into a single mass with very little or no chance of a glue failure, because if a glue failure did happen the grip could easily break (imagining the shock caused by a tip strike on a hard object).

Another good example of a grip that is roughly contemporary with this is the seax of Charlemagne shown below, slim and attractive as I imagine them to be, but again no ferrule. (Matt Bunker)

Another very interesting grip has been posted by Jack Sutter on my Facebook timeline, again shown below. Personally I find this amazingly ugly and could only work with a rat tail tang that seax tended not to have, it also does not have the ring of reality to me, but would nonetheless make for a very secure grip on a blade type and weight that would love to slide from your grip in a melee.......

Also an interesting input from James Elmslie on my FB page
"I recall talking to Professor John Hines, from Cardiff university, on the subject of seaxes, and he was saying that a fairly large number of those found with mineralised organic parts still attached have been identified as Horn for ferrules (makes sense, given its better-resistant to splitting, compared to wood), with wood more common for the main body of the grip - so I'd be inclined to look at horn, wood, and perhaps horn for an end-cap to get a sense of symmetry, and then to look things like the Cumwhitton seax x-ray fragments, and think about inlay of silver and brass/bronze in similar \/\/\/\/\/\/\ style patterns into the wood as there?"

I agree about the horn and have used it for this application many times, but still it does come back to adhesive. I am not familiar with the Cumwhitton seax, but that is sounding very interesting and will have a look.

Now I know I can rely on epoxy, but this project is not about that, and so I will go and have a look at historical adhesives for this role. In the past I have made a mixture of pitch and rosin for the main adhesive base, but this can be a little brittle, so I temper it with a bit of oil. Sticky as hell and largely self healing if it does crack, a perfect adhesive for this unless our warrior was fighting in the midday sun in the Sahara. Joking aside though it could get very hot in Byzantium and the Russian Steppes. Thoughts?

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153459712666647&set=p.10153459712666647&type=3&theater

Tod

[Jeroen Zuiderwijk]

[Tommy Johansen]

There are two x-radiograph images of the Cumwhitton seax on page 20 (pdf-page 27) in this report:
http://services.english-heritage.org.uk/Resea...011WEB.pdf