The blade’s oldest and grandest form: the great historical types and how they worked, what they were made of, why the katana and the longsword still grip the imagination, and how a modern maker takes a sword from bar stock to finished blade on a 2×72.
The LARP world fights mostly with foam and latex — no grinder required. But wrapped around it is a real steel-fighting economy: armored combat…
"Blunt" is not one spec — it is three different builds, and mixing them up is how display pieces end up in stage fights…
The greatswords are where sword mythology runs wildest — the fifty-pound barbarian blade of the movies — and where reality is most impressive: five…
China organized its swords into a duality the rest of the world never quite matched: the jian — straight, double-edged, the scholar-gentleman's blade, "the…
The sword never actually died — it just changed jobs. Today it is sporting equipment, theater prop, historical laboratory and craft object at once,…
The rapier is what the sword became when it left the battlefield and moved to town: a civilian's weapon for the street and the…
A rebated edge is a manufactured shape, not an absence of sharpening — a specific flat-and-radius geometry that must pass a tournament marshal's gauge…
Half the world's swords curve, and the reason is one piece of physics: a curved edge meeting a target does not chop, it SLICES…
Not-sharp blades still have a steel decision, and it is really a safety decision wearing a cost question. The short answer: mild steel is…
Before the types, the vocabulary. Every sword — katana or claymore, gladius or rapier — is the same short list of parts negotiating the…
Sword steel selection is knife steel selection with the priorities inverted: at three feet of lever arm, toughness is nearly everything and wear resistance…
Ask a room of sword owners what started it and the honest answers are rarely museums: it was Aragorn reforging Narsil, a Kurosawa duel,…
Swords begin as the first weapon designed purely for killing people — every earlier arm descends from a tool. The ancient world worked out…
No blade carries more mythology per inch than the katana — the folded-a-thousand-times, cuts-through-tanks legend machine. The real sword underneath is better than the…
The longsword is the European counterpart to the katana's fame: the two-handed cruciform sword of the late medieval knight, the centerpiece of the German…
The Viking sword is where bladesmithing history gets genuinely mysterious: gorgeous pattern-welded blades giving way, at the top of the market, to a run…
Every knifemaker's customers eventually ask, and every knifemaker eventually wonders: could I make a sword? Yes — the 2x72 that grinds your knives grinds…