Random q's about swords

Hey all,

Played in Dark Hart of Camelot the yesterday which was my first opportunity to play around with live combat LARP safe weapons. Got a couple of questions about 'em, and LARP combat in general:

  1. The surface of the sword was quite sticky; Daphne said that’s because they were wrapped in plastic for shipping and to fix that you dusted them in talcum powder. Wouldn’t that colour the swords a little? How do you avoid it getting sticky?
  2. The sword I was using (which has obviously seen quite a bit of use/love) looked like this:

    Are you able to repaint them? Do you have to do something with the latex (i.e take it off) first? Can you re-latex them? Is there anything you can do to stop the paint flaking off (I assume not, given what they’re used for :slight_smile: )
  3. Combat: How hard do you need to hit someone for it to count as a “hit”? Quite a number of times in the fight I was touched in the arm or the torso but there was very little force behind it - other times I was quite defintely HIT :smiley: I know it’s kind of a dumb question to ask over a text-based medium, but what counts as a hit?
  4. Trust me to pick on the only guy who had actual real fencing experience :laughing: However it did bring up another question; since he couldn’t thrust, it cut off a lot of his repertoire; is it simply a matter of safety for that? It didn’t seem to me - in all of my considerable one fight experience :wink: - that you could really do a lot of damage with a thrust, although I imagine it is actually quite bad for the sword - the tips were reasonably squishy and a powerful thrust I could see bending or at least creasing the tip quite severely.

Also I got hit in the head - not a big deal it didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it would :slight_smile:

Oh for the record he got me 7 times and I got him 4… needs work :laughing:

Viperion

A little thing we call “Punch through”. Punch through is bad, so dont thrust unless your weapon has been designed with alot of coreless tip (like the stakes we had at st wolfgangs that were fully coreless). The swords have a hard rod that runs down the middle. Thrusting over time can cause the rod to work its way through the foam and come out as a pointy jabby eye removing thing of pain. This can be lessened during construction but the risk is still there particularly if the rod breaks half way down. We had some spears in the gear library in auckland that were having a problem with punch through due to their construction…I got on that immediately and they are now headless shafts waiting to be worked on at the next gear day (probably into halberds and pole axes). Its a serious safety concern…in my opionion the biggest with larp safe melee weapons.

The swords we sent down were all my personal stuff, and they’ve seen years of heavy use and lending out.

The sticky surface happens when the sealant wears off and the latex itself is exposed. I wish we had a decent sealant to recommend here in NZ. I hear that PlastiDip is good. In the absence of one, I use talc or silicone spray (but the former fades the colour, and the latter makes them slimy).

[quote=“Viperion”]
Are you able to repaint them? Do you have to do something with the latex (i.e take it off) first? Can you re-latex them? Is there anything you can do to stop the paint flaking off (I assume not, given what they’re used for :slight_smile: )[/quote]
You can sand them down and resurface them. But you need the gear. And as Ryan has pointed out, we don’t have a good sealant here, so a repaint has its own issues.

The standard is that any contact is a hit. What generally can be ignored is drum rolling where someone hits you with a series of rapid taps. The standard is 1 second between or the forearm (at least) is drawn back 45 degrees between strikes.

As stated punch through is bad. You can simulate a thrust by bring your sword in at an angle and tapping with the side of the tip but in saying that, tapping hits are cheap and nasty.

When people are being careful and pulling blows its not too bad when its accidental. It doesn’t take much imagination to extrapolate reckless and on purpose blows to the head might do.

A couple of the swords, which seemed to be a different make to the rest, did have some of the surfacing paint/latex stick to the inside of the plastic sheath and consequently get pulled off when they got taken out. I’ve heard of this happening before, and the chances of fixing them seemed pretty low.
I might rub them with talc to get the stickiness down, but I don’t know that there’s that much I can do for them - especially with my complete lack of experience…

They can certainly be fixed, but they’ll never be quite as pretty as they once were.