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Old 12th May 2012, 08:38 PM   #9
Paul
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Join Date: Oct 2011
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I think I get what you mean now. Its a good question. I think it would be quite revealing if one were to find a culture that defined "perfect angle". This would suggest that the art of weapon making had become so refined as to be "fossilized" in that culture. -That tradition had made a weapon so prescribed that technological innovation and practicality were no longer as valued as custom. It would be a bit like defining the value of a working dog by its conformation to breed standards, rather than by the quality of its work.

As someone who cuts for a living I know you can only define a perfect angle for a specific tool of a given steel at a given hardness doing a specific job, accepting a certain sharpening interval and a certain risk of chipping. That works for controlled conditions like machine tools in a factory but, with the exception of duels, combat situations are rarely controlled, so a warrior is taking a risk if he adheres rigidly to tradition in all circumstances.

One should also consider that the angle of grind varies along most good blades depending on the job which that section does -be it the point of a scandi knife that is usually blunter because it must cut curves in wood and pierce hard things or the first half of a sword blade that gets used in a fighting style that uses much edge on edge parrying and so risks chipping. A culture would need to be quite prescriptive to have rules for all these things. That would be very interesting. It would be a very stable culture one imagines, more prone to infighting than coming into contact with a range of differently armoured enemies.

However, advanced armies need to specify standards to smiths or they may get substandard items. Here there must be set angles by default of pattern measurements.

For example the Fairbairn -Sykes pattern makes a very good balance of trade offs in edge angle for piercing, cutting and edge strength in a knife of modern carbon steel, designed primarily for stabbing men who are not wearing armour but may be wearing thick winter coats. The knife is a British classic but when the Americans tried the knife, they made it too cheaply (I think it was an example of competetive tender gone wrong). The manufacturer used substandard steel for what is actually quite a delicate blade and the knives were found to break too much, which was one reason the americans rejected the knife. Even a space age superpower cannot place blind trust in a tried and tested pattern for a weapon.

I wonder how far back western military blade patterns go and in what other cultures official blade patterns can be found?
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