Some pieces you start and work until they are done. Other pieces have a more rambling and haphazard path. Fingrbitr is one of those.
Fingrbitr ("Finger Biter" in english) started out with
Emiliano Carrillo and I sitting around talking about the new blade he'd forged. He wasn't sure what he was going to do with it, and I mentioned that I had a set of type Z fittings I'd been carving for the last few months as a side project. Then we realized the Ashoken Bladesmithing conference was in two weeks, and decided we'd combine our projects and try to get it done for Ashoken.
If you want to see the details of how we made the sword, we posted a thread on
Bladesmiths Forum. We got it done just in time and took it to the conference in a deluxe cardboard and duct tape scabbard.
Afterwards the sword went home with Emiliano to get a real scabbard. That took a few months - life gets in the way of swordsmithing...
Once the scabbard was done it eventually made its way to my house, where it spent another few months while I worked on the design for the chape and locket, and then carved and cast them. So 6 months after we combined our projects, we finally got this one done.
The Details:
The blade is made of three twisted bars of 1084 and 15n20 with an edge wrap of 800 layers of the same materials. It weighs in at about a pound and a half. The blade is 30 3/4 inches long and has a fuller running almost its entire length on both sides.
The sword weighs 2lbs 13oz / 1273g. It's 37" overall.
The point of balance is 6" from the hilt.
The pivot point about 20" from the hilt (hard to figure it out exactly by yourself). The center of percussion is 21" from the hilt. Having these two points in almost the same spot and that spot being approximately 2/3rds of the way up the blade means that the sword will handle well and hit hard at the sweet spot.
Fingrbitr got its name because of all the times Emiliano and I cut ourselves while making it. Emiliano brought the edges down to sharp while finishing the blade (so there is no sharpening bevel) and it ended up with that aggressive cut-you-just-for-touching-me kind of sharp.
At the time of this post Fingrbitr is available for purchase. You can
email me if you are interested in it.
