It’s always the way, without an event in my social life projects can spend years on the bench as I have the attention span of a butterfly. In this case, my fencing club had a raffle at the Christmas Banquet and I volunteered to provide the first prize. With the deadline approaching and work at the forge entering the final stages of the Christmas rush, I cast about for something that already had most of the work done on it.
I came across the dagger I have been working on for a couple of years, its so old in fact that this was one of my first experiments in drawfiling a diamond section blade as a new apprentice. So after I’d had a good laugh at my previous efforts i polished up the blade and did some work on the crossguard and pommel to make it a more elegant weapon. The crossguard was shortened and given a convex cutoff to give it a bit of movement and I lightened the pommel to improve the balance (it sat a bit too far towards the heel of the hand before). I also carved six shallow radiating trenches in the top, a common detail on medieval daggers. Sadly due to the looming deadline, I forgot to take more glamour shots, the only ones I had were taken for the Banquet webpage.
The grip is the same wood as it was in the beginning, spirally carved and then overlaid with soaked leather. I added dagged (spiky) collars at the top and bottom to add a little visual interest and to mimic the carving on the pommel.
All in all I think it turned out a rather handsome knife, and the raffle winner was very pleased with his prize. It is currently razor sharp but I have offered to blunt the blade for him should he want to use it to fence. Personally I rather think that would spoil it but I’d always rather see something used than just sitting in a drawer!
Making the Past 