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Originally Posted by Valjhun
I'm not so sure what taper-tapering means... Could someone explain me more precisely?
Thanks!
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"Taper" just means "getting progressively narrower/thinner." In a sword, one often speaks of "distal taper," meaning the amount the thickness of the blade decreases as you go toward the tip ("distal" end) of the blade.
Most blades have what Puff is calling a "single taper," meaning that the thinning of the blade is at a pretty even rate, while most dha have a "double taper" (good terms, by the way -- I definately am going to use them
), meaning that there are different rates of thinning along the length of the blade.
Imagine holding a sword straight up, in front of you, with the spine directly towards you and the edge away, tip pointing up. A "single taper" blade will have a profile like a very long, thin triangle, with essentially straight sides. A "double taper" blade will have curved sides, slanted toward each other more at the base of the blade, then gradually gradually becoming more parallel, like the outline of the Eiffel Tower. If you look on my web site I have for many of the swords measurements of the blade thickness in four places: at the forte (base), 1/3 of the way to the tip, 2/3 of the way to the tip, and basically at the tip. You can generally see that the width of the blade decreases a lot in the first 1/3 of the blade, usually by more than half, and by the second third of the length has almost reached the full taper seen at the tip. You can see it pretty well in this photo:
The spine is almost a centimeter wide, 95 mm, at the base, and tapers to only about 15 mm at the tip over a blade length of about 50 cm. But about 3/4 of that taper happens within about 10 cm from the forte. Since dha and daab generally do not have a heavy pommel to counter-balance the weight of the blade, this kind of double taper moves the point of balance back toward the grip instead, actually further back than your typical Western or Japanese sword, which makes the blades very light in the tip and "fast."