How To Test A Sword Quickly

hey folks I'm Matt Easton and I really like swords now I'm sent a lot of messages and unfortunately I was sent a quite interesting message I think about a week ago related to when I'm filming this video of course and that had a question now unfortunately I cannot for the life of me find this message so many apologies if you asked me this question and I've subsequently lost your message I meant to make a note of your name I think your name might have been David but I can't remember many apologies feel free to comment underneath and say that's me that's me okay and and I will like it and say this is the person but thank you for that question anyway and also just while I'm talking as I'm always talking on this channel of course and but I would say once again apologies I can't answer all questions and queries that I get I have like four jobs and I can't sit there answering questions all day and I'm really sorry for that because I do really appreciate you and as this video illustrates sometimes I get a really good question and I respond to it and so the question was if I remember correctly the question was how do you assess whether a sword is good if you don't know anything about it so I think and I might be wrong I might be making an assumption that's incorrect here but I think that this question comes about from the basis of if you were in a survival situation and you found a sword how would you assess whether you could trust your life to that sword or perhaps it's a role-playing game type thing and you've been you've escaped to prison and there's a there's a guard asleep and there's a sword and you take the sword and you know this cut there's all sorts of scenarios we could make up to say why you might need to do this in and actually you know we can laugh about this and we can think about it in role-playing or bluffing whatever kind of computer gaming terms but actually this is the sort of thing that that must have happened historically okay it must have absolutely happened that people must have grabbed a sort of taken a sword or even bought a sword and the person wanted to assess whether that sword was good right so I'm gonna show the things that I would do initially I'm going to show bitten in here and then I'm going to step outside into my garden to show you some other things I'm looking at the gun show you some other things that I would do to assess how good that sword might be so first up I'm just going to take this sword so this is a Cutlass 1845 Cutlass that has recently entered my collection that does mean that I'm going to probably have to filter one of the other Cutlass is after my collection one in one outdoor policy simply because I can't have all the color suits but this is very nice condition it is a bit grubby at the moments made by Hampton and it's got a Birmingham proof mark on it probably dates to the late 1840s around 1850 and it's no something so it's it's it's relatively a relatively known quantity to me in that I know the model of sword I know it's an eighteen forty five pattern roll maybe Cutlass I don't know it's made by hain't inand hayton was a fairly decent maker and I can see that it's got a Birmingham proof stamp on it so I already know quite a lot of information about this particular item but I just thought it's something that I haven't cleaned up yet and I don't mind demonstrating some things with because I trust it to be fairly strong but let's assume for the purposes of this video that I don't yet know anything say there's no markings on this and it's a slightly unfamiliar model of swords me so the very first thing I'm gonna do when I pick it up okay is a knight it's funny because I do a lot of these things now I've been obviously I've been collecting sword since I was about sixteen seventeen years old I'm now 41 god I'm so old so I you know a lot of years and there are a lot of things I do kind of instinctively subconsciously without necessarily realizing I'm doomed so when I picked up this sword just before I switch the camera on there are a few things I did when my brain thought what the topic of this video was now one of the things was I grabbed the hilt and I did this okay so this would apply to many evil swords or swords with complex hilts or you know forms of basket guard or whatever first thing is to find out is the hilt secure on the tang that's the first thing is there any movement is there any movement in grip or any movement in the garden those are two separate things so to find if there's movement in guard you hold the base of the blade assuming that it's either not sharp down there or you hold it so the sharp edges and not cutting into you there's no movement at all there let's check the grip because you can't have movement and one and not in the other no movement whatsoever then you look at how it's attached to the tank and I can see that it's pinned very securely at the end so this is absolutely rock-solid and incidentally if you hold the sword relatively lightly thumb and do that some swords I have to say this is exaggerated because it's a Cutlass with an iron grip and an Iron Guard and steel blade and so it's all quite one solid piece but any sword even a medieval sword let's just grab a medieval sword to demonstrate this off the wall let's grab the so-called Henry v reproduction if I grab that and hold it relatively lightly by the wooden grip different ring pleasing this is I feel a whole channel now different what does this sword sound like nice ring said that tells us that it's relatively solid some people I noticed someone on one of the Facebook groups could have been all swords or one of the others asking why does some swords make a ring and some make a dull clack and quite simply it's to do in my view it's to do with hilt construction and how secure that helped construction is if it's very tight and very solid on the tang you will generally speak and get a ring if there isn't a ring it tells you something's loose okay and as John Musgrave weight says if something's loose and the hilt tighten it or get it tightened right so that's the first thing the hilt is completely hell that's quite solid the hilt is completely tight on the tank next think blade and obviously this is actually in a sense the most important thing although you want to know that the hilt is secured on the on the blade because you can have the best blade in the world and if the hilt some rubbish the blade might go flying out of the hilt or it might be moving around and hilt and you can't hit with proper edge alignment remember if the grip if there's any movement between the grip and the blade might be quite difficult to align your edge in the cuts you weren't cut effectively when you do hit but in terms of the blade there's a few things we're going to do now the think I'm gonna do inside and then I'm going to step outside and carry on talking about the blade out there so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna do a very gentle flex test now surprisingly that doesn't tell you as much as you might think that it's supposed to tell you and there's a reason for that that I'll explain so not all swords are spring tempered so for any of you who watch forged in fire you'll notice that sometimes they edge quench now swords were sometimes edged quenched famously lots of Japanese swords and some Indian sorts and were essentially just edged quenched so they had a relatively soft back but a relatively hard edge now what this means is if you have a soft back and a hard edge you are unlikely to have a spring or very much spring temper European blades at least of this day are pretty much always done like a spring like most modern production swords okay so this type of sword is a spring that tells me a couple of things instantly first of all if it Springs just a little bit and goes back to true I know that it's been hardened and tempered okay so well I don't know that it's been tempered by no it's probably being tempered if it's just being hardened it will probably be very stiff and at some point it will go snap okay but if it's been hardened and tempered and incidentally unfortunate fire they don't show the tempering and I have no idea why they always showed the quench and so a lot of people now think that they know about knife making and think that all knives are just quenched well they have to be tempered as well otherwise you end up with the incredibly brittle blade but and even more so with a sword because it's longer so we know that this is spring tempered essentially which is means it's like a spring like a leaf spring it's a sharpened leaf spring so that's the next thing now there are a couple of other things I'm gonna do and I'm gonna step outside to talk about those so the next bit is kind of simplistic and kind of funny but you want to hit something you want to hit something that's relatively forgiving in this case I've got my trusty old punch bag there now there are a few ways you want to hit it and this is based on the Wilkinson test in other words the test that Wilkinson Sword Company now who make razors and things like that used to do clearly we're going to hit on the edge we're going to hit on the back and we're going to hit on the flats as well you don't need to do it very violently okay just enough to give you an idea about how solid that hilt is and also how the blade reacts to that okay so first of all give it a couple of good whacks with the edge yeah it's all good back edge bit difficult with this kind of help but you can still do it good yep everything's all solid and tight flat not so hard because that's more aggressive to the blade and it's more likely to damage it hitting with the flats it's not designed to do that good it's all true nothing nasty happened good there's one other final thing and this was sometimes done it was sometimes done on iron plates believe it or not two testily hardness of the steel now we're not doing that here that would be quite destructive especially as this is an antique and but simply something that's fairly resistive we could do this against the wood lightly or we could do against the punch bag against the punch bag we're gonna get penetration as you see that you see how easily that goes in remember the speed rune and small sword test I did you'll notice because this is a wider stiffer heavier blade it goes that far in with very little effort at all okay but we could equally do that on the wood okay and we've got no no damage you can see it's a fairly light test it's not doing any damage to it whatsoever I'm doing it in a very very controlled way but it's giving me information now there are finally a few other things we can test which might be more destructive but we're going to talk about those back inside yes so here we are back inside and there are some more destructive things you can do to a sword to ascertain its quality now there's essentially two things apart from we've already talked enough about the hilt and how secure the hilt is you can bash it around you can wrench it you can do also that you can just basically repeatedly hit something and see if it loosens up things are the various relatively simplistic things we can do to the strength of the health but just focusing on the blade and the blade quality so there are essentially two qualities that most sword blades have from them and I also went to mention about the fact that some things were only edged quenched now if something is only edged quench and I'm just going to pull one off the wall that probably is only edge clenched and that is this indian tawa now if I were to flex this indeed this does flex a bit but I wouldn't want to flex this too much because from past experience and getting antiques that were bent and straightening them myself I know that many Indian swords are relatively soft at the back but are clearly edged quenched and in fact this roots sword behind me here any of you who've watched my etchings of wootz steel blade will know that there's a hardening line visible on that blade so I'm fairly certain that this is only edge quenched as well that being the case if I flex one of those blades at some point it will stay bent I mean theoretically any blade will stay bent if you bend it far enough but the ones that are only edge quenched will stay bent at a with less flex okay so the Flex test is only to be done up to a certain point one thing I mentioned is small swords in the 18th century there are treatises that talk about testing small swords by thrusting them into a wall now clear this is going to slightly blunt the point although remember that walls at that point might be wattle and daub they might not be break you know but nevertheless thrusting into a wall even if it's plaster or whatever don't worry about the fact that the tip gets a bit damaged that can be resharpen but what you're testing is the temper of the blade does it flex and come back to true but coming back to this sword so that the more brutal things I can do to ascertain the quality of this blade they come down to two particular categories of thing one is toughness and the other is hardness now very clearly you can make a piece of steel very very hard but not tough what do I mean by that well you can make you can quench it but not temper it you can give it a very brutal hardening quench so you make the edge very very high let's like 65 Rockwell okay which would be very very hard for a steel sword edge it might be 65 Rockwell but if you drop that sword it will shatter like glass okay whereas if I've quenched that sword and then I temper it and it comes back down to say 55 Rockwell it now might have a pretty hard edge that is by sword stone and 55 Rockwell is pretty damn hard just about as hard as most functional swords get Japanese swords sometimes get a bit harder than that but it will have toughness that is it will be able to absorb shock without breaking like glass so and it's all to do with the way that the structure lines up in the steel the crystalline structure but so what I want is a tough blade that's reasonably hard and we have to remember as well that whilst it might be ideal to have an edge that's hard and the blade that's tough if you can't for some reason if you're having to make in a primitive environment survival situation something that is sharp but not hard it will still cut flesh it will still cut bone it will take damage doing that but it will still function as a weapon and something in the to mention forged in fire again that sometimes annoys me is they talk about something which hasn't taken a quench well not being a proper weapon or not being a functional weapon hello what about the Bronze Age what about the Iron Age like it's just rubbish okay you can have something that's made of a softer metal copper bronze iron you know any metal that's softer than than steel that you don't necessarily quench or harden it's still a functional weapon it's still a sharp bit of metal okay anyway enough of that rant so the final way that I could test this if I want it to be as good as it possibly can be is doing a more brutal flex test and indeed that is what the Wilkinson Sword Company used to do they used to mount the sword in the approve at machine and flex it to a certain number of degrees and back again and check that the blade was still straight and then flex it to a certain number of degrees to the other side and check that the blade was straight if it was it was proved stamped if it wasn't if it was bent it would be thrown away okay so they only took the best ones the other way you can test is for and the other thing you can test is for hardness now the way that they do it again in forged in fire is usually in this many blacksmiths will do this once something is being quenched you just get a file and put the file over the edge and if it skates over the surface and doesn't really bite in then it shows that it's hard if the quench hasn't taken because you maybe you didn't get it up to a high enough temperature before quenching it for example or it's not enough carbon in the blade so it's just not good enough steel for quenching then when you put the file across your fill the file biting in and filing away the surface okay so you can test it with a file but what if it's a survival situation zombie apocalypse role-playing game you've taken a sword off a guard how can you test the hardness of that blade well there are several ways one you can literally just grate it against something and see how much damage it does a hardened steel blade if you're familiar with hardened steel a hardened steel blade against brick for example will take very little damage and will carve a bit off the brick whereas a soft like mild steel blade will take damage against brick you will know that you will have that frame of reference but if for example you have a knife you have a knife of known hardness and this is something I don't necessarily condone but say for example you have a knife that you already have in your possession and the sword has just come into your possession and now you know that this blade is relatively hard you know that at what it is compared relatively to other things that is so what you can do is you can literally go think with the two edges into each other and see which one takes more damage and that will give you a frame of reference so if this one puts a big notch in this and takes no damage you know that this is a hard blade and this is a soft blade if they do equal damage or similar damage you know they're probably roughly equal hardness so there we go folks I have as it's kind of interesting it might be useful for role-playing games or whatever kind of scenarios you're thinking about you can tell an awful lot about swords quality purely from some very very simple things you can do and non destructive as well and nothing I have shown in this video done to this sword has done any damage to whatsoever it still still rings like a bell it's still lovely beautiful thing in very nice condition it's grubby needs cleaning up but it's a lovely lovely piece lovely Cutlass one final thing I would say is if you're testing if you're genuinely in the real world testing a training weapon for example like a Feder or a fencing foil or whatever do not test it too often because methyl fatigue okay so airplane wings eventually get decommissioned because they get fractures and it's exactly the same thing with sword blades if if I get this and flex flex flex flex flex if I just do this for like 20 years eventually it will snap okay if I flex it slightly too far slightly too far slightly too far at some point it will go ping and snap okay metal fatigues that's why when you get to thin piece of metal and go Bend Bend Bend Bend it breaks so at work hardens in a localized area fatigues snaps and that will happen with training weapons so you don't want to regularly be flexing your Epis files fetters or whatever you don't be essentially testing them on a regular basis because that's also fatiguing them but conversely it's kind of its kind of a paradox here paradoxical point if it's a training weapon you want to know it's safe so equally you do want to test a training weapon before you then go and practice with another human being with it where it might break and gash them or stick in them so you do want to check that it does flex safely and return to true and that you can hit it on a forgiving soft object like my punch bag and it's not going to shatter into pieces okay I hope that's giving you some food for thought and I'll see you for the next video cheers folks

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 70,654

Rating: 4.9656777 out of 5

Keywords: how to test a sword, how to tell if a sword is good quality, how strong is a sword?, how can you test a sword?, sword quality, sword testing

Id: aPceapmO-Zc

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Thu May 31 2018