#dagger #maingauche #manosinistra #daga
A dagger used along with a sword in personal combats in accordance with the rules of Spanish and Italian schools of fencing. It had a robust blade and was often made to match the sword in construction and in decorative features. The parrying dagger, which appeared toward the end of the 15th century, as fitted with special defensive devices. Long straight or curved quillons extended from the hilt in the plane of the blade or slightly bent in front of it. A strong side ring protruded from the hilt perpendicular to the blade to protect the fingers. There were many varieties of blades. Spring blades could be split into three when a button was pressed by a thumb. Other blades had the form of a comb designed to catch and possibly even break the tip of the opponent's sword.[1]
Few years ago I met Giovanni Sartori, a brilliant young sword maker, a true scholar of this art, and as such, slowly he pushed me to try my hand at producing something of the olden days. Jumping straight in to a full size sword for me was just too daring so I settled on making a dagger, a left hand dagger, that I hope to pair to it's own rapier soon, so keep your eyes open for that build ;D
As any bigger project I prefer to lay down some drawings and keep in mind some inspirational works, basic historic lines and so on. In this instance I took inspiration from several works but most could link back to this ones. I took single details, like the fullers with the tracery/decorative holes, the guard design, wiring and some other aspects.
So lets get down to business, rummaged in my high-carbon steel pile and I found a nice chunk of 6mm flat bar of 80crv2, good stuff and also the only thing in 6mm that i had at the moment :)
The blade itself was designed by heart and eye, removed a bit here and there till it felt right. Fullers were made by following a bunch of scribed lines, using an angle grinder with respective 3 mm and 10 mm discs, for a total of 5 fullers on each side.
Then later was cleaned and trued up by improvised tools made out of old chainsaw files and HSS drill bits, a tedious and long work.
Once the fullers were trued up i started drilling all the holes for the decorations, some might say that my work sequence is a bit counter-productive, but for a first try it went ok.
the hardest part was to then file all the holes to form the patterns, after 5 minutes at the first hole I understood that my 15€ set of needle files from the crafts store were utterly useless, so as any project drunk person I went on-line and threw some money at professional needle files set +-100 euro (really good stuff but each time one brakes, you cry inside, and eventually I broke 4 out of 9)
After the holes were made the next step was a bit more of cleaning up, and then get the blade ready for Heat treat.
80crv2 is a fairly easy steel to work with and is decently stable even with weird geometry. But as any scarred fool that filed for 3 days straight in the cold workshop i decided to leave it at full thickness and just wing it... brought to aus temp, quenched, fixed a little warp in the quench "vanishing" plastic stage and put it between 25 mm thick plates of aluminium to just keep it straight till room temp.
Double tempering cycle at about 350°c and moved on, yes it's softer than ordinary knives but i mostly went for other characteristics.
Next massive step was the guard, and let me tell you, it's almost harder than the blade.
Start by choosing a "weird" quillon section and punch the tang hole 2 size bigger, then fling in across the room out of the vice as you grind it and boom you end up restarting from scratch :) .....in the end I was happy for a fresh start as it gave me a way better guard.
To secure the ring snugly in to the guard there is a round plug that goes in to the guard, super tight fit plus these two pieces are brazed together with a silver alloy.
Both parts are out of mild steel.
Slowly but steadily I was moving forward, next one were the pommel spacer and the pommel itself, lots of fidgety work here as both have separate functions.
the spacer, pressed down by the pommel acts as a washer/pressure surface to later on keep the handle and wire portion nice and tight, if it's too big then it goes over the Turkish knots if too small it does nothing :| so a really touchy part of the construction
The pommel also had 2 variants and after trashing the first I started from scratch as was clearly too light and the blade was just too front heavy and came up with this design, maybe too simple but was the most reliably and easy to make.
Quickly i got to working on the handle, so i just whipped up a 2 piece construction out of some soft wood and wrapped it up in 2 distinct wires. These wires are each made out of 2 individual 1.3mm mild steel twisted, one to the left and one to the right.
This way when you pair them on the handle it gives the illusion of a way more complicated twist but...it's not :) sadly i have zero wip pics of the turkish knots ...sry <3
This kinda brigs the build to a conclusion...i was not going crazy with the finishes or extreme accuracy as even the originals, unless made for parades for important ppl, are pretty average in these aspects.
Of course as any build there are parts that are just hard to explain with text or pictures and also some details are for the keen eye and the eventual future owner of the dagger+rapier set ;) looking well at the finished pics you can maybe spot a detail that id didn't mention on purpose ;) let me know if you find it :D
I guess is time to show it off in it's final form :D thanks for tagging along, see you soon with more.
btw :) Total length is 45.5 cm and the weight is about 720g
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