Swords

These pictures are of one sword which has taken me a whole week to fix. The bell needed to be totally stripped of nickel plate, dents and scratches sanded away, the incised designs needed to be deepened, and the whole bell was polished, ready for plating. That was a long, but fairly straightforward job. The scabbard is of course, a little more interesting, in that it was badly damaged. We suspect a horse stepped on it. The scabbard is steel, with brass tips, drags, and ring holders.


The above two pictures are of the left side of the sword, and you can see the deep crease, (deep enough to interfear with the sword inside!) and a totally unwarranted scratch in the plating. The nickel has done its job of protecting the steel though....no rust, and because it is harder than the steel, it seems to have shrugged off a lot of abuse. At this stage, I have laid it out on the bench, and am selecting which of the several irons I will have to use to get those deep dents out.

This is the right side of the scabbard. There are two major dents in it, and a lot of wrinkled metal. Sometimes things look less damaged in real life than they look in the photographs, but no...these dents look just as bad when you have them in front of you. The metal in the higher crease, that is, the one closer to the bottom of the picture, is almost bent double.

Here I have placed my tools all together just to give some scale to the job. Tomorrow, I'll post a few pictures of what they look like after the first 20 hours of work to bring these swords back to life.