How to - My new bone handled sword and scabbard

[M. Demetrius]

You are a very methodical and patient man, Crispvs. Your work looks like it will be most excellent. I guess you now know why they charge hundreds and hundreds for some of the custom stuff, eh?

[Crispvs]

Thanks David.

Now for the next bit.

Having punched in the design, I then proceeded to use the same punches to punch out the openwork areas, using heavier hammer blows. Again, this took me a considerable time to carry out. The plate was somewhat warped following the punching of the fine lines. Punching out the openwork warped the plate even more.



I then repeated the above process for the chape plate. Unfortunately I was on something of a roll as I did this and did not remember to photograph the process. I made the chape plate from the same piece of plate as the locket.



Obviously with the plate that warped, it would have been virtually impossible to do a neat job of the locket and chape so I had my first go at annealing the plate and beat it about somewhat with a rubber mallet, first on one side and then the other. This flattened the plate nicely, but as it was my first attempt at annealing I had not heated he plate sufficiently and as a consequence parts of is became quite brittle and some of the small connecting pieces of the design broke. This was disappointing but I consoled myself with the knowledge that many actual scabbards must have shown similar damage during their active lifetimes. You will notice that the flame from the propane torch has changed the colour of the plate.

All holes for the attachment of other elements of the scabbard were made with a punch and widened to the required size with the point of a needle file.



Crispvs

[M. Demetrius]

Punching out the openwork warped the plate even more.

That could be the reason they said to punch the holes first, so you could flatten the metal before scribing the details? :?:

[Crispvs]

Next bit now - the appliques.

Never having done any metalwork in my life before this, aside from the odd bit of riveting, filing and casting pirate wargames figures in my late teens, the idea of embossing strips of metal along their entire length to produce an even line worried me. Accordingly I got in touch with David Hare of the ESG (who advertised on RAT a few years ago as 'Pompeii Swords') and he graciously sent me photographs of the formers he uses to make these self same parts.

I set about perusing all of the drawings and photographs I had of scabbard parts (I did not have a copy of Miks at the time) and selected a number of profiles I liked and felt might be achievable. Having done this I set about making a number of formers of the type David Hare had shown me out of thick brass. These were all two part formers featuring male and female halves designed to be compressed in a vice. Not being the owner of a vice I had to make do with a large 'G' cramp.

Initially I had thought that the longer I made my formers the more consistency I would achieve, given the reduced possibility of alignment errors. However, when I started trying to make my formers, I quickly realised, thanks to continuously checking my progress by making impressions in plasticine or occasionally blu-tack, that sawing and/or filing trenches in pieces of metal tends to produce trenches which are deeper at the ends than the middle and I found it very difficult to achieve consistent depth along the trenches or consistent height along the ridges. Consequently I found myself cutting my pieces of brass smaller and smaller until they were of the same proportions as David Hare's. I had wondered why his formers were so small and now I knew.

When I made the formers I tried to make an allowance for the thickness of the metal to be pressed. However, I did not get it completely right first time and I had to re-cut most of the formers until I had it right. As a consequence of this process I have a large number of short brass test pieces lying about showing varying degrees of success. The first time I successfully pressed out a part which I knew I could actually use I felt quite a sense of elation and triumph.



I found it quite difficult to get consistency along the longer pieces, the problem now not being inconsistency of depth but the tendency for the pieces of brass to shift slightly as they were pressed between the formers. Despite having drawn a pencil line with a ruler along the middle of each strip of brass, as well as having filed lines in the ends of the formers to show the correct alignment points, I still found it difficult to keep them true along their lengths and I had to make a number of attempts before I had made two I was reasonably happy with (and only then thanks to the fact that I was well aware that the Romans themselves weren't always that careful about achieving the best of finishes).



After several weeks of making and remaking formers and pressing out test pieces and failed attempts, I finally had all of the appliques I would need for the scabbard, aside from the palmette.



I made the chape terminal from part of the same door handle I mentioned in my first post. After sawing off an appropriate piece, I then spent around four hours filing it until it closely resembled the terminals I was seeing on the remains of Pompeii type chapes in Miks, complete with a slightly hollowed out interior which was recessed to accept the chape's side guttering. Sorry there is no clear picture of this. My camera cannot take clear pictures at the close range which would have been necessary.

More shortly.

Crispvs

[Crispvs]

Next step, the suspension rings.

I decided that the best way for me to make my suspension rings was to cut them from brass tubing. However, I found it impossible to find brass tubing (as opposed to brass plated steel tubing) which was of an appropriate diameter and thickness. Because of this, I bought a length of copper piping, but although I did cut rings from this, I felt that the copper might distort over time thanks to its comparative softness and the weight it would have to carry. This again left me wondering what I would use to make my suspension rings from. Then, when I was in the local hardware shop looking for grass seed (yes, like most English people I do maintain at least some interest in gardening and yes - I do have rose bushes) I saw some brass pipe fittings which I felt might have potential.



After filing the screw threads off the two pieces I bought, I cut two rings from each and filed their internal surfaces somewhat to achieve rings of more or less the right size and thickness, which I think should do the job.



Crispvs

[Medicus matt]

Excellent work and well done for documenting the process so throughly Crispus.

Just a couple of things I've learnt from my own experience in making scabbards.

1. Oak. Never use oak for scabbards, lined or otherwise. Any moisture (including oil from the blade) will draw the tannins out of it. Leaves horrid black acid staining on the metalwork that's a bugger to get out.

2. The formers for the ridged/fluted strip and the problem of drift. I had the same problem which I resolved by modifying my formers with a groove in the bottom set wide enough for the strip to sit in, recutting the top set accordingly. Made the whole thing much, much simpler and quicker.

[Crispvs]

Next installment: the scabbard leather.

I had three pieces of leather in suitable weights for using to cover a scabbard, one in a bright pink I had bought in order to use to make a purse for my wife, one in a chocolate brown and one in a deep blue. Whilst recognising that the Romans themselves would probably have loved the bright pink, I was not quite ready to inflict it on our modern sensibilities, or, for that matter, to be seen carrying a bright pink scabbard. This left the brown and blue leathers. Of the two I preferred both the colour and the weight of the deep blue leather but was skeptical of the possibility of such a dark blue being able to be achieved by the Romans on leather. However, around this time I spoke to an expert on ancient dying processes and he saw no reason at all why the Romans could not have dyed leather deep blue. He said that there was evidence that iron filings were often added to dye to achieve a much darker colour and said that if the dye was prepared at the right time of year, woad with added iron filings would be able to colour appropriately tanned leather quite a dark shade of blue. I asked him about navy blue (which is darker than the leather I had) and he thought about it and said that he didn't see any reason why such a dark shade would not be achievable, as long as the woad was of the right maturity, was harvested at the right time of year and there was a sufficient quantity of iron in the dye bath. In the light of this I felt I was able to choose the blue lambskin leather without running the risk of it being inaccurate.

Having selected the blue leather I cut an appropriately sized piece and glued it to the wooden scabbard body, in such a way that it wrapped around and met at the back. I deliberately cut the leather a little wide so that there was a bit extra at the point where the edges met in order to allow me to sew a seam. I left an area of about half an inch wide down the centre of the back (where the leather met) unglued, in order for me to sew it up later.





When it came to sewing the seam down the back of the scabbard I decided not to use an awl to make the stitch holes. This was something of a departure for me as I have always sewn leather using an awl to make the holes in the past. However, I felt here that the awl might stretch the thin leather somewhat when making the holes, which would lead to a much looser seam than I wanted to sew. This needed to be a fairly tight seam hard up against the wooden body of the scabbard. Therefore I decided to stitch with sharp needles (as opposed to the blunt points I normally sew leather with). This initially created a problem for me as the holes created by the needles were much smaller than the holes which an awl would have made and it took much more effort to pull the linen thread through the stitch holes than I was used to. As a consequence of this, the first few stitches of the seam were a lot less neat than I would normally wish to achieve and so I decided to use pliers to pull the needles through. This worked well and I produced a fairly neat seam from there on. I continued the seam down to a point level with the point where the scabbard starts to narrow to a point. At this point I paused, as the tension on the leather enabled by the parallel sides of the scabbard would not be present past this point and so the area to be covered by the chape had to be approached differently.



Crispvs

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

Oddly enough, the staining from inside my bronze helmet has dyed the leather inside a dark blue colour too. You would think it would go green. Just a note on the blue.....

[Crispvs]

Now to the scabbard point.

It should be said first here that (as far as I know) we do not know how the Romans themselves carried out this part of the operation, so what I have done here is only a possibility for how it might really have been done and relied in part on the fact that much of what is described here will be covered by the chape.

Carefully smoothing the leather down so that there would be no horizontal line level with the point the stitching had reached so far, I then glued the leather down over the point, again leaving about half an inch unglued down the centre for the seam and also making sure to avoid getting glue on the edges of the scabbard point.



Once the glue had dried I then continued the seam down to the point of the scabbard.

Following this I cut off most of the excess leather from around the point, leaving only enough to cover the edges. I then applied glue to the edges of the wooden scabbard point and smoothed the remaining leather down over it, so that the leather met edge to edge down the sides of the point and completed the covering of the wooden body. Once this had dried I trimmed the excess leather away from the seam down the back of the scabbard.



Crispvs

[Crispvs]

A couple more pictures.

The front of the scabbard



The back of the scabbard, showing the seam.



I also glued the leather down over the mouth of the scabbard, as I had decided not to add a top plate to the finished piece. A number of top plates are known from Mainz type scabbards and at least one top plate probably coming from a Pompeii type scabbard has been identified, but as far as I can tell there are no surviving Pompeii type lockets which feature top plates. Celer has also informed me that when he examined the Guttmann locket himself he could see no evidence that a top plate had been attached. On that basis, with some misgivings, I decided to simply fold leather over the top of the mouth and glue it into plate. This may also prove to be gentler on the bone guard of the sword than a top plate might have been.


(apologies for the blurry photo. My camera is not much good when it comes to close up images.)

Crispvs

[Astiryu1]

Ecxcellent work on the Sheath! I can't wait to see the completed project.

[Crispvs]

The advice I had from Matt Lukes about bending the edges of the locket plate around was to put it in a vice and bend it gradually in three distinct places. However, the only vice I own is a small hobby vice which is not big enough for this sort of thing. My solution then, was to take a length of right angle steel and fix it into my adjustable workbench, in order to provide me with a raised horizontal surface I could fit clamps around. To complete the makeshift vice I clamped a piece of flat steel plate over the piece of right angle steel with two G-cramps.



As the brass plate was not completely flat following the process of punching in the decoration, I annealed it and clamped it tightly between the steel plates. I then loosened it and shifted it somewhat, as the right angle plate was deliberately narrower than the locket plate, and clamped it agai to ensure that the whole plate was fairly flat. I took it out to check on it and then placed it again between the steel plates, making sure that it was carefully positioned so that the part exactly corresponding to the piece which would need to be bent around on one side was projecting, and then applied the clamps, doing them up as tightly as possible to ensure that the brass plate would not move.
I was going to do the three separate bends on each side as Matt Lukes had described to me but in the event, having done the initial bend on each side, I decided to try bending it around the scabbard body itself instead. Having decided to do this I annealed the brass plate along both edges, bringing it to an orange-red before allowing it to cool. Once the plate had cooled down sufficiently I attached it to the scabbard body, temporarily passing nails through the holes already punched into the plate into the holes which I had already drilled through the scabbard body (as will be noticed in the photos above of the leathering process). Having done this I found it very easy to bend the sides around to conform more or less perfectly to the shape of the scabbard body. I then hammered the nails through the plate where it curved around at the back, in order to punch holes to let the rivets which will eventually occupy the same space pass through.

I didn't take a photo of the plate being bent in the makeshift vice but here is the fully bent plate sitting on the right angle steel section.



I had already punched holes near the upper corners of the locket plate and so now I cut a piece of brass plate to create the band which passes around the back of the locket. With close reference to the holes in the corners of the locket plate, I punched holes into the new piece of plate and then soldered and riveted them together.

This photo was taken just before I soldered the joint and the rivets are only sitting in position here. I appied the solder to either side of the holes, being careful to ensure that no solder was able to obscure the holes. The new plate ended up being a fraction deeper at one end than the other but this does not bother me particularly as one often finds that actual Roman equipment was made a lot less carefully than we are sometimes led to believe.



Finally, here is a photo of the locket plate temporarily fitted to the scabbard body, It gradually seems to be coming together at last.



More in a day or two I hope.

Crispvs

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

REally nice work Crispus. Good step by step as well!

[M. Demetrius]

It makes me wonder how much in relative terms, a scabbard/sword would have cost in those days. And remember, while we regard it as very beautiful (and it is) the first purpose was to be a weapon. Sort of like gold inlay and engraving in a handgun, I guess. How many weeks' labor would it cost a soldier to get a well made unit like this? :?

Very beautiful work. And very ingenious use of materials to come up with the vise. With some modification to the top plate, a chape could be bent the same way, couldn't it? Matching the angle of the scabbard at its distal end, and use the same technique. Hmm. :!:

[Crispvs]

Thanks for the compliments!

Right - next step.

Having got the basic locket shaped and assembled, it was time to attach the ribbed appliquee pieces.

Following Matt Lukes' advice I attached pieces of solder to the undersides of the appliquee pieces prior to assembly to allow my hands to be free to hold the torch and locket plate without needing to have the added hassle of finding a third hand to apply the solder with.
I decided to attach the horizontal appliques first.
I had already punched small holes through the appliquees to allow the later insertion of small pins. For the time being I used these holes as location points.
I found it very difficult to hold the pieces in the right places with pliers so ended up placing the locket plate on the right angled piece of steel and holding each appliquee in turn in place by pressing down on it with the nose of the pliers while I played the torch over it to melt the solder. This ended up working very well. The only problem was that the appliquees did not conform to the gentle curve which had been created on the front surface of the locket plate so they seem to lift away from the main plate at each end.



Next I attached the long vertical appliquees. Again, I had trouble holding them in the right positions and the method I had used for the horizontal appliqees did not work for the long pieces, given their position. I ended up placing the torch on its base in a fixed position and holding the plate and the appliquee at one end with pliers (the end I would solder first) while I held the other end in position with my hand (I was not able to keep it correctly positioned using two pairs of pliers). I then brought the part to be soldered up against the flame. This worked well and having done the first joint I turned it the opposite way round and used precisely the same method on the other end. With both ends secure I then pressed middle of the appliquee against the locket plate as I had done for the horizontal pieces and soldered that too. I did the same for the other long vertical piece.



I should say at this point that as I intend to tin the metal parts eventually all of this assembly will have to be undone again as the higher temperature needed to tin the pieces would melt the solder and make it fall apart anyway. For the tme being though it brings it to a usable state and I have learnt valuable lessons in how to do these things which I will be able to use when I come to reassembling it again.

For now though, here is the finished locket plate in position on the scabbard body.



Well, that's all for now until after the weekend. Hopefully the next part to show will be the chape.

Crispvs