Quote:
Originally posted by Thoran:
I know Damascus is just another way of processing iron into steel... and as I said, todays steels are well beyond the capabilities of Damascus anyway. Maybe I didn't look into the museum store data enough but it seemed they were using some off the shelf steels in their blades... and until the advent of the Bessemer process such purity was unattainable (and I seem to recall that's why so much folding was needed... to force out the impurities), the lifespan of the long sword was well before the advent of Bessemer. I'm sure the good quality functional blades made today using off the shelf steels are superior in every way to the most radical period blades (except perhaps in geometry unless the new blade is patterened exactly after a period blade).
It appears there may be some disagreement regarding weight, I've seen a couple references to the L.S. historic weight being in the 3# range... but perhaps it's not so cut and dried. Certainly the later long sword designs would have been lighter given their taper, perhaps that's part of the discrepancy.
As far as swinging even a 2 1/2 pound blade... I can only imagine what a couple hours of that would be like, because I could never do it. Of course the guys back then were swinging blades from childhood, and I imagine someone will get used to any reasonably weighted and balanced blade (although it may take a while).
FWIW... Here's another site, Del Tin... these guys have some nice looking stuff, and their stuff appears to hover in the 2.5-3 lb range.
http://www.deltin.it/swords2.htm
Here's another link with some very nice looking swords... reasonably priced too for the most part.
http://www.ancientedge.com/subcategory_8.html
makes me want to get out my checkbook. [img]smile.gif[/img]
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Heh I know what ya mean by the checkbook. Anyhow its not really shelf steel its simply the kind of steel, but still, with sword design many modern methods can do great with the steel itself but horrible on the design, for many people it can't just work, it has to "look cool" today people want SUV swords for one person. Its kind of sad isn't it, sword design has decayed while we advanced in most other things, I suppose its just wasn't paid any attention. Anyhow as I said before, the normal weight of a historical longsword was around 2.5 lbs, its a very solid number as well because many antiques have been recovered from dig sites like the aforementioned battle of visby and they weigh in at this number. You might want to check out the oakshott institute, its got good info. Now for Del tins, all in all they make decent blades, their hilts however are often times pretty bad, some come in rattling which is terrible, they also are known to break a bit to easily to ensure really solid craftmanship. I'e never tried ancient edge but their swords are definately beautiful, if they really are as they claim, then I might just get one of those.