Blade Question

[Rapier9mm]

Ok guys, i need to tap the vast international knowledge of all of you....

Is the Leon-Paul Budget FIE maraging Blade illegal?

can anyone help with that?

thanx

Reuben

[tsalyards]

If it has FIE stamped on it, you can bet that it's legal.

-Tad

[Gav]

Why wouldn't it be?

[Rapier9mm]

weird, because at our Nationa Opens, since the blade as you know has a collar on in was banned...hmm....coz i like my one, real flicky & my opponents want to break it. lol

[haggis]

To have an FIE stamp a blade must meet FIE regulations and Paul's budget maraging blades are FIE-approved. However I have heard of them being rejected by some World Cup weapon controls for no good reason. Leon Paul aren't the only ones to have suffered and these rejections seem to be based on national bias (e.g. German weapon controls rejecting Italian or French blades and vice versa)or aesthetic grounds, along the lines of: "That's not a foil blade. It's too damn ugly to be in my competition!" which may be true up to a point but isn't really the purpose of weapon controls.

[veeco]

--- To have an FIE stamp a blade must meet FIE regulations ---

Not quite true. The SEMI is the commission appointed by the FIE for checking fencing equipment. When a blade manufacturer wants to put and FIE stamp on a blade, they send a sample of their blades to the SEMI for testing. Once it is approved, the manufacturer can put an FIE stamp on their blades. This process is repeated every so often to make sure that the quality of the blades is consistent and doesn't change over time. However, there has been some trouble in the past when at some competition the SEMI would test an FIE stamped blade and find that the blade actually did not meet the standards anymore. In that case, the blades (which also have a date of manufacture stamped on them) were simply rejected, but they still had the FIE label.

It is the responsibility of the vendor to take those blades out of the market, but sometimes they still sell them, hoping that someone won't notice.

I think such a thing happened not so long ago with France-Lames epee blades. You could still buy them, even though they were not approved by the FIE, and had an FIE stamp. Some vendors would sell them for cheaper telling their customers what the problem was. Some others were not that scrupulous. The point was that the blades were actually dangerous (breaking with a sharp angle) and they should not have been used at all.