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Originally Posted by Jim McDougall
Ibrahiim thank you so much for this very observant response, and especially for the added detail of the Sword of Stalingrad. I was completely unaware of that piece and it is most interesting that the steel was produced by Sanderson& Newbold. In material on the sword it is noted that the 'steel' was produced by this firm and the sword was forged by Wilkinson.
The firm was a steel producing company in Sheffield as noted from about c.1901 and before.
In wartime, any manufacturing firm can and usually will be 'retooled' for the war effort. In this case, a textile firm 'Platt Bros.' was indeed recruited to provide munitions as well as some machinery. Just how much textile production remained I am uncertain, but was certainly a good degree.
In WWII, bombers were built by many factories which had nothing to do with aviation....some appliance factories built them, car manufacturers etc. the lists are amazing.
During 1969 I worked for an electronics firm who produced warheads for 105 mm howitzers bound for Vietnam. The contracts were independant of the main production lines but produced by the same company heading.
The blades for many kaskaras are noted to have been produced during and after the Mahdiyya from lorry springs, and certainly other tool steel might have been used as well. In locally produced blades of such materials, the markings were not carefully guarded nor placed, as evidenced by other sheet steel blades with off center or partial remainders of original stock marks.
It is not unusual in many ethnographic weapons to discover these kinds of anomalies..I recall a Burmese 'silver' mounted dha from years ago where I found a discreetly placed stamp from Everready, the battery firm in the mounts.
The use of tools, especially files, is well known in weapons, and the first Bowie knife is actually believed fashioned from a file. This is especially common in SE Asia weapons as I understand.
All the best,
Jim
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Salaams Jim, Thanks for that detail... The Stengun (Stirling Turpin Enfield) story also has an interesting tale in that no factories were able to make the curved magazine however a miniature railways company filled the gap as they had the machinery to make curved miniature railtrack and with some modifications were turning out magazines for the Sten in no time at all... Interestingly the war office turned to sewing machine factories for machine gun technology in WW2 especially for precision machine guns on fighter aircraft as apparently the mechanisms are similar to sewing machines..!!
Often remodelled bedford truck springs are used on Omani work knives or taken straight from the Victorian Sheffield, or Solingen butter knives of the 19th C. In this case it is intriguing that apparently a machine part probably off a weaving machine has been made into an African sword.
Regards,
Ibrahiim al Balooshi.