Nathan Bell's La Tene
While this wasn't my first La Tène design, this was my first that I did with plans to make myself. Nate and I worked very closely together to come up a sword that we were both happy with and that would stand out and be unique from any other modern interpretations. We both had interest in a group of swords that could best be described as having decorations riveted to the hilt; mostly in the form of metal domes. One example that stood out to us was one depicted in Navarro's The Finds From the Site of La Tène plate CXVI, pictured to the right. Other examples used to a lesser extent were the Wetwang Slack sword (below and left) as well as an example from Gournay III (below and right). Of course the Kirkburn is probably the most famous of this style of hilt.
The Blade I choose for this project was Albion Armorers' blade used for their La Tène II from the First Generation Line. When I received the blade it had been milled out and heat treated, but had not been ground. The major changes I made to the blade consisted of adding a greater degree of profile taper in the last one third of the blade, removal of the triangular shaped ricasso, and modifying the shoulders.
In the photographs to the left you can see that the original guard material was to be a black walnut, and the grip material was bone. The guard plate and grip spacers are wrought iron from old wagon wheels. The following three were taken just after I drilled the guards to counter sink the domes. After this point, I bought a cylinder of water buffalo horn and replaced the bone. I also began to run into problems with the walnut guards as well, because of the cut of the wood and grain direction it wasn't finishing as nicely as I would have liked. Then, as a result of the grain and thinness around the domes, chipping started to occur and the guards were scrapped. At this point we considered other wood options, but I was afraid that no matter what wood we used, the buffalo horn grip would overshadow the wood as it had been doing. So I found a source that would custom cut buffalo horn and convinced Nate to give it a try. To avoid future problems with the thin area around the domes, I allowed more area around each one.
Sadly, the story doesn't end here. I delivered the sword to Nate the day he was hosting an Albion Armorers' Round Table gathering. During the evening pool noodle cutting, it suffered a nasty chip to the blade when it made contact with some PVC pipe. The sword returned home with me the following day and was disassembled a few days later. The blade was then shipped back to Albion to be tested, where it was found that the edge hardness was too high. Upon further investigation we realized that this was one of the very first blades made after they switched over to 1075 and when they heat treated it for me while I was visiting, they were still in the testing stages of heat treatment for the new steel. Albion replaced the blade and I salvaged all the hilt components except the grip and a couple of the domes.
Nate and I both agreed to give this project another go. We were both too happy with the final sword to give up on it. So I reground the new blade as closely as I could to the first one and put in an order for more buffalo horn. I could have picked up another cylinder, but the grip was the one thing about the first sword I wasn't as happy with as I could have been. So instead, I custom ordered another block of horn so that I would have more creative freedoms than I had with the cylinder. The first three photographs below show the grip roughed out. The next two show the grip further along and narrowed slightly as per Nate's request.
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