I got bored and measured a few blades. Here are the results using a cheap spring scale that I set to an accurate 500gm weight. Bending is measured in cm.
Foil all FIE type
grams-force/Chevalier/Prieur 1986/Absolute/Leon Paul #3/Viniti/STM
100 3.8 3.8 3.2 3.8 3.8 3.2
200 7.6 7.6 7.0 7.0 6.4 5.7
500 16.5 15.2 15.9 15.2 15.2 12.1
Did you apply the force 3 cm from the end and clamp it 70 cm from the end with the blade facing up?
The way they are "officially" tested is that the blade is clamped 70cm from the end. A pointer is aligned with the blade at rest. Then a 200g weight is hung from the blade 3cm in, and the difference in deflection is measured.
Your blades do seem to be in spec if you measured correctly. Of course, for conformance purposes, only the 200g measurement matters.
Yes.
The test setup follows the published method.
200gm-f is pretty small and I wondered what a higher load would produce.
Perhaps next time I will just measure the load required to produce a 90 degree tip angle.
The consistency across many brands and years was interesting, the exception being the STM FIE which was getting really close to the limit.
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Last edited by the ancient one; 11-02-2009 at 11:20 AM..
Yeah, I just got back from a stint as (assistant) team armorer for the US team at World Championships. We tested all blades, and of course, the staff for the event checked them, watched over by the FIE (Dan DeChaine was the lead SEMI rep). I was surprised how many blades failed. It wasn't 20%, but it was more than one or two.
We did notice a couple of newish STMs that failed. Most of the other failures were on well used blades.
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