"Spare parts" hunting sword

A mid-18th-century hunting sword built around a Medieval Fightclub mini sabre blade.  The blade and the ground-down M8 hex nut are the only parts I bought for this project; everything else is either spare material or bought for other projects and left behind when the specs changed.

As such, the fuller has a round start where it should be square.  Also the hardware is a bit less ornate than would be normal on this type of sword.  The belt buckle is from Bucklecastings.  The crossguard is a Crazy Crow Bowie guard, hammered into a slight S-curve and with a pair of cold-forged volute finials silver-soldered on.  The finials and all other brass hardware (except for the escutcheon pin added to prevent the pommel plate from rotating) are fabricated from various pieces of sheet and bar stock from Ace, with most detailing hand-filed.  The difference between the Crazy Crow and Ace brasses are noticeable where the finials are attached to the quillon block because Crazy Crow's brass is more reddish.  It's also softer yet more prone to cracking when cold-forged, even after annealing.  I'm very lucky this guard didn't, but another one I tried to use for this project did when I attempted to "unroll" it a little.  If it weren't for the prospect of cracking, I would have re-flattened the current guard, since I am finding that the finial bumps annoyingly against my index finger if I hold the grip wrong, which is why I tried to straighten the one that broke.  The hilt is assembled with pitch glue.

All leather is veg-tan, stitched with linen cord and finished with homemade walnut hull dye, olive oil and beeswax.  I did only two applications of dye.  The second time, I stirred up the sediment from the bottom of the jar and painted it on evenly to produce a very dark brown, let it dry, re-moistened it with a wet brush and wiped it all off, leaving the leather a pecan shell color which is darker than its natural state, but not as much as the initial dye applications seem to promise.  The oil and wax darken the leather further and bring out its natural orange color, which combines with the walnut dye to produce this orange-brown (without the walnut, the natural result would be what's commonly known as saddle tan).  By the way, I think the near 17-inch length is about the most that a single-layer scabbard of unhardened leather can be and still be useable.  It's already more flexible than I'd like; any longer and it would need a wooden core or for the leather to be baked or otherwise stiffened.

The grip is American walnut with linseed oil and oil-rosin varnish.  I designed it to match my belt knife from 2017, and originally I planned to give the sword a wooden scabbard core with a sheath for the knife.  However, I made a mistake when I tried to put the core halves together with pitch glue to make it water-resistant.  It turns out that while pitch glue is good for joining leather to wood, it's not so good for joining wood to wood — which makes sense, otherwise it would've been more commonly used for that historically.  The seams kept cracking even with light handling and finally broke apart completely when it fell off a desk, and with its edges saturated in pitch, I couldn't just reassemble it with hide glue, nor did I have the patience to make a new one.  This isn't entirely a bad outcome.  As is, the vertical carriage makes the hilt stick up uncomfortably close to my ribcage (I'll probably just use angled frogs from now on).  Adding a side pocket for the knife would have required the locket to be even lower on the scabbard so that the knife could clear the frog, in turn requiring the hilt to be even higher relative to the frog and belt unless I wanted the frog to hang down even lower than it does, which would make drawing awkward — it already almost requires one hand to hold the frog down when drawing.  I plan to eventually make a separate sheath for the knife that can just be tied to the belt, as the original is finished with modern dye and acrylic, and doesn't match the new leather in appearance.

The locket is soldered to the throat instead of being stapled directly to the scabbard.  The chape is a rolled cone closed at the tip with a soldered 1/4-inch brass tack.  Both the throat and chape are epoxied — I would normally want to staple the throat and use pitch glue, but in this case the scabbard fit the blade so tight when the throat was in place that there wasn't room to spare inside the scabbard for the method of stapling I've been using on other projects.  So I used epoxy to hold the hardware on as best as possible.  If I had known ahead of time that I was going to wind up with a single-layer leather scabbard, it would've made sense back when I made the locket to attach a staple to it, obviating the need for a throat and leaving the scabbard loose enough for the staple as well as allowing me to dispense with the only modern material this sword uses.

I had to remove a lot of the 1mm edge to get this blade cutting sharp, and it's still not a great cutter.  It can chop into an old Halloween pumpkin, but just bounces off water-filled plastic bottles.  Someone more skilled than me could probably make it sharper; however, the steep primary bevel resulting from the relatively thick, narrow blade would place a limit on how sharp it can be, unless you reprofiled it with a shallower grind.  Also, the entire sword is less than two feet and weighs under one pound, so there's not much momentum or leverage behind blows.  I can see this in the role of an informal town sword with some defensive use, which was common for the little hunting swords of this period.  As such, this is probably a good representation of Resenter I.