u/Iantheduellist

I'm struggling with money but I can make a nice steel hilt for a smallsword and I've been wanting to compete in smallsword for a while.

Edit: Thanks a ton for the insight. I'll be getting epee blades soon.

I'm currently trying to make some practice smallsword blades for HEMA practice out of really small 1045 round stock, quenched in water. The blades take the heat treament just fine but end up warpped and twisted. How can I prevent these issues? Would having a homogenous thickness on the blade help. Or is it the water? What can I do to prevent or take out the bends on these blades?

I'm reading Capo Ferro again and I've always noticed that the subtext of his manual sometimes is just an angry coach yelling at his students to cover the line while thrusting. Just imagining this fancy poof rapierst fuming mad and yelling at his terrified students "COVER THE LINE YOU FOOL) 🤣🤣

I'm currently going through a really important part of my wip, which has had very few long chapters and a lot of really short ones. Is a very sudden difference in chapter leangth going to be jarring to readers? I personally don't mind it, but that's just me.

I'm a bladesmith in college with little resources, but I think I can turn my bladesmithing forge into a armor forge. But I can't heat treat armor. I don't have the container to do it, nor the money to make it. So I want to know if its possible to make a breast plate without heattreatment.

I recently posted here a meter long rapier that took a great big warp. Thats the third attempt, the first one was a diferent blade that broke when it took a bend near the tip and I was trying to correct it. I'm using 1045 for these blades and quench them in water because I'm a broke college student in Mexico and can't afford oil for every quench, nor can I afford to import better steel. So I'm stuck with having to hammer out these blades out of 1045 and quench them in water. Is there a way that I can correct a warp on blades this long?

I'm in the process of making a rapier and I fucked up the postition of the hilt parts. The finger rings don't line up and the rings on top are not flat but rather slightly angled uppward. Could I heat them up and bend them to the correct angle?

1kg with a p.o.b thats 15cm/6inches from the cross and a sub 1 mil edge, barely counts as blunt. I'm considering turning it into a spadroon/broadsword and reducing the width of the edge in order to get some thickness back... (it has a diamond cross section) Idealy, I'd want a 1 kilo rapier to have a p.o.b 6 or 3 cm away from the cross, perhaps even closer if I want to not cut.

I've recently encountered a video that said that a lot of large publishers reject novels due to a lack of internal character voice, but that is kind off telling instead of showing. So what's up with this? Shouldn't we want to not be more subtle when describing a character's world view? Or is it better to be excplicit when doing this?