sword weight/beefy-ness

[Deron Douglas]

Hi,

I've been wondering about something. I've seen (and held) a variety of swords from various ages. And in some cases, some are nicely weighted while others seem noticeably heavier. I'm 5'10" so I find the lighter ones more comfortable in the hand, while the "heavier" ones seem... well heavier.

 

While I haven't had a chance to weight any of them, my guess is that what I consider heavier is about 1/3 more than the other lighter ones. The over all sugata seem similar and the length are relatively the same at around 25-27 inches.

 

I was wondering if anyone else noticed this? I'm thinking that different schools or ages produced "heavier" or "beefier" blades. Maybe the heavier swords were produced for "actual" battlefield use during the warring times, and the lighter ones were produced for non-warring times? Most of the time the lighter ones were shinto.

 

Has anyone thought about this?

 

Cheers,

Deron

[Stever]

I've definitely thought about it, but I don't know if my thoughts are of any use to you. I'll admit right off the bat that I haven't handled very many swords at all. I will say that from the info I've read it seems certain schools did tend to make beefier blades, and blades in general tended towards the heavier end in shinto times. Major generalizations there.

 

That said, I have 3 waks - 2 shinto ubu and 1 possible koto o-suriage. The 2 shinto blades couldn't be more different. 1 of the shinto swords is ~19" nagasa and thick with little change in kasane along its length. It feels very heavy in the hand. The other shinto has a 21" nagasa and is quite thin; it feels rather light in hand. Almost too light. The last wak is ~23 inches, and in hand feels somewhere in between the other two. I haven't actually weighed any of these blades, but I'd bet the last one is really the heaviest due to length and geometry, but the balance is better which makes it easier to move around, thus it feels lighter. The heavy feeling blade balances slightly tip heavy; the light feeling blade handle heavy.

 

The last thing is that since koto swords have been around longer, there is the possiblility (likelihood?) of their having been polished more, which I would think would make it more difficult to say if a brand new koto sword would be heavier than a brand new shinto sword.

 

Bottom line, I have no idea. That info's probably collectively locked away in togishis' minds. Nagayama's has some info.

 

cheers

[b.hennick]

Hi:

I have two Hizen wakizashi that are heavier than the typical katana. One is by Tadakuni and the other by Masahiro. Both look very similar and have similar weight. They are much much heavier than their typical wakizashi. It could be special order blades...

[Deron Douglas]

Hmmm... interesting. You're right about the koto blades probably being polished more, and therefore being lighter since material is being removed. Makes me wonder... so if the shinto blades are heavier (less polishes) and the koto seem lighter with less weight... would they have started out with more material?

 

I would think that going into battle a person would want more blade... ie beefier... I'm not sure either.

 

Be interesting to see what other people have found.

 

But yes, it could be a "special order" sort of thing as well.

[Ken-Hawaii]

Just to add my two yen, my wife & I both practice MJER iaido using standard zinc-beryllium iaito, & we're certainly used to their weight after many years of swinging them. So when we started tameshigiri a few years ago, we were both a bit surprised that the modern-day folded-steel shinken ("live blades") are so much heavier.

 

We're also both engineers, so we carefully weighed & measured the blades. My shinken, which is exactly the same length as my iaito (2-4-5, or two shaku, four sun, five bu), weighs 17 ounces more. That's obviously because of the steel blade instead of the Zn-Be alloy, so no big surprise. The balance of the shinken is about two inches forward of that of the iaito, probably because it's made to do physical cutting (rather than the virtual opponents we slice & dice in iaido).

 

But what was really interesting was when Linda bought her Showato katana last week for jodo practice. It weighs four ounces more than even her shinken, although it's about 3.5 inches shorter. So we measured the thickness of the blade at the nakago & along the nagasa, but both were slightly smaller than the shinken. So the only conclusion we can draw is that the Showato steel itself is more dense than modern-day steels. The iaito & katana both balance in almost exactly the same place, thank goodness, so her forearm will just have to get used to the weight difference.

 

I haven't quite wrapped my brain around that one.... So if anyone has ideas on steel density, please comment.

[John A Stuart]

Hi All, The weight of some swords should show differences in weight due to the niku of the blade, given other dimensions were equal, which changed over time like much of the other characteristics of specific periods and schools. What elements are in the steel will affect the weight as well, but most nihonto would have had similar alloy content, carbon and iron. Some nambantetsu made have different components but would not affect much noticable weight difference. Modern shinken can have a larger range of density due to what alloy it was made with. eg. steel 7850 kg/m3, stainless steel 7480 to 8000 kg/m3 or relative density 7.75 to 8.05, mild steel at 7.85 weighs 0.283 lb/in3 John

[Darcy]

Generally any newer daito will be more beefy than an older daito of the same length due to a couple of factors.

 

The first being that the older sword has probably seen more polishes, so loses material.

 

The second being that the older sword before it became suriage into shinto-standard lengths was likely designed from the get-go to have thinner kasane in order to reduce its overall weight. A sword designed from scratch at a shorter length does not have the same problems with weight that a 80+cm blade has.

 

For this reason when you pick up a sword for kantei with the tsuka on that looks like nambokucho o-suriage in sugata, but feels very weighty and has a lot of kasane, you can usually rule it into one of the shinshinto or shinto copies of this period, the sword being ubu.

 

That's a generalization, there are always exceptions. I had a Kinju naginata naoshi that felt like it would cut through a car, it was massive.