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Popper · 10-09-2003, 05:37 AM

Cant we please all just agree that the blooodchannel of the sword (epee or whatever) is just for making it lighter and nothing else.. I mean.. the thing about th blood channel beeing there for making the sword beeing easier too pull out of the body after haveing stabbed someone is kind of silly.. isnt it?

give me your worst.. hehe

lochinvar · 10-09-2003, 09:13 AM

The fuller--commonly but erroneously called a "blood channel"--serves two purposes.

1) It lightens the blade, moving the balance point back toward the hand. This makes the sword more responsive and less tireing to use.

2) It stiffens the blade in the direction of impact, while making it more flexible from side to side. (Think of it like an I-beam.) The more flexible the blade is sideways, the less prone it is to break when bent in that direction.

It has nothing to do with blood or easy removal. That is the product of fevered imaginations that know nothing of how to use or forge blades.

wflaschka · 10-09-2003, 12:43 PM

If it's a myth, then it's being propogated at the highest levels of competence and knowledge in fencing. For example, I just finished a Lukovich book, where he mentions that the fluting of the epee blade is descended from the blood gutters of yore.

Also, it seems intuitively obvious that if you stab someone using a blade that has a ragged cross-section, you'll get less suction. This is because the lip of the wound can't make an airtight seal around the blade. When you're talking about 18" of penetration, the suction can become annoying or dangerous.

I cannot test this hypothesis... the children in my class are too fast.

I think we have good reasons for the gutter today, and good (but different) reasons for having the gutter in the past.

veeco · 10-09-2003, 12:52 PM

The thing is, and perhaps someone will correct me on this, modern day blades don't look like what say, a rapier blade looked like. I am not sure old rapiers had those "blood grooves" in the first place.

Second, I can hardly imagine someone being penetrated by 18" of steel and still being able to fight instantly. You'd have at least sometime when you are in shock. And if you gave a mortal wound, then wait for the guy to collapse, then put your foot over his cold body, and pull your blade out. Then throw it away since the blood is probably going to make it rust extra quick :-).

The other times when the penetration is less than 18", which was probably most of the time the case, it seems like it would not make that big of a difference and it would be easy to pull the blade out.

lochinvar · 10-09-2003, 01:10 PM

Rapiers, for the most part, had no "gutters". When they did have fullers, they were purely ornamental.

Smallswords--from which the dueling epee is descended and by extension also the modern epee--also had no fuller. Check any picture.

The most popular blade cross-section for both of these swords was a modified diamond-shape, optimized for punching or thrusting. Any fuller in the blade would have weakened that profile.

The fuller was primarily a function of chopping/slashing swords, where the geometry would give some advantage.

As armor improved in the 13th-14th centuries and cutting became less effective, the fuller gradually disappeared on "working" blades and thrusting became the attack of choice. The diamond profile just worked better.

Any retention of the fuller in blades since the early 15th Century are vestigal and ornamental. I'm sorry to say, on this one subject Lukovich doesn't know his facts.

The "groove" or "V" shape of the modern epee blade is a compromise design that serves the same purpose as the original fuller. It makes the weapon stiffer than a foil blade but still flexible enough to bend when an attack connects.

wflaschka · 10-09-2003, 01:39 PM

I concur. With modern fluting, the cross section of the epee looks like this: V.

On older blades, the fluting went more like: >< or }{ -- that is, small gutters on either side of a vertically aligned blade. (ASCII just isn't good for drawing pictures of blades...) IIRC, the gutters usually extend the first 1/2 or 2/3rds of the blade. In terms of sword-smithing, this would make the forte and meso of the blade lighter and more rigid.

In terms of blood-letting, suction probably isn't an issue for hits with the foible. It probably became useful for those monster impalements you get as accidents of combat (but not duels, where you only have to worry about one enemy). Even during a duel, if the stabbed enemy doesn't collapse immediately, you'd want your blade back to parry late-arriving attacks. I attack into preparation, hit, slurrrrp!, parry, riposte! Or some such thing.

I'm guessing that our ancestors probably knew more about cutting and stabbing wounds than most of us. The day-to-day fighting, hunting, and slaughtering of livestock gave them lots of chances to experiment.

Feanor · 10-09-2003, 02:11 PM

Geez! Don't get me all excited like that! I knew the answers regarding the functions of the fuller, but the subject of your thread made it sound to the overly excitable (like me) that there was a new station on tv devoted to the blade arts, including fencing!

The Biography Channel
The History Channel
The Discovery Channel

The Blood Channel

*laughing*

Can you imagine? a Channel completely devoted to Swordplay movies, National and International Fencing coverage of all types, Human interest fencing stories, documentaries of the History and current trends in Fencing and Swordplay, Technical shows on the latest technology, materials and techniques of Fencing, biographical shows of famous fencers past and present?

Hey, I'd pay good money to subscribe to THAT channel!

Even if it was called "The Blood Channel" (kind of a cool play on words as well)

lochinvar · 10-09-2003, 02:11 PM

wflaschka, I imagine there are some street-toughs in inner-city Detroit that could probably match them...

Even well into the 19th century, fullers still appear on weapons intended for slashing/cutting--cavalry sabers, Scottish broadswords and backswords, scimitars, katanas, and the like. But they seldom if ever appear on weapons intended for thrusting, which is the purported purpose of a "blood groove".

Since it only takes 3" penetration to kill someone, a "blood groove" in the bottom 2/3 of the blade would be silly and practically useless.

And I don't know about you, but I've tried stabbing a triangular-cross-section bayonet (Civil War era) into a side of beef and it's damned hard to penetrate more than 4-6 inches even with your weight behind it.

However, you do point out that the fuller in older weapons--even thrusting weapons--serves to lighten and stiffen the blade. I didn't bring that out "fully" (pun very much intended!).

Wizardly · 10-09-2003, 06:21 PM

I'd really like to hear one of the owners of a blade forge to weigh in on this.

Where are those pesky classical fencers to recount the history instead of the performance when you need one?

I never really did hold much faith in the 'blood groove' myth. It's nice to see reason dispell it.

Honestly, when I saw the topic of this thread, I thought you were talking about a "blood channel" on television. I gotta say, I'm a little disappointed.

Inquartata · 10-09-2003, 09:51 PM

Hie thee to www.swordforum.com. There are experts aplenty there, including both high-level custom swordsmiths and museum-connected scholars. They will tell you that:

(a) The "blood groove" idea is a myth. The fuller was used for weight reduction and structural integrity, as already mentioned, and perhaps served a secondary decorative function at times.

(b) The "suction" idea is a myth. Once a sharp object pierces the skin, there is almost nothing to slow it down unless it encounters bone. The same is true when withdrawing it.

(c) Some rapiers and some smallswords ( see the colichemarde ) had fullers. Some didn't.

Quote:

veeco wrote I can hardly imagine someone being penetrated by 18" of steel and still being able to fight instantly. You'd have at least sometime when you are in shock.

See these two articles:

http://www.classicalfencing.com/articles/kill2.shtml

http://www.classicalfencing.com/articles/bloody.shtml

I have read some of the accounts the authors uses as examples myself in various sources, but he does a good job of pulling them all together and tieing in the anatomy and physiology of stab wounds...it's enlightening.

veeco · 10-09-2003, 10:03 PM

I have read those articles before, they were mentionned one time in the British fencing forum. First they made me feel really ill, and I honestly had to stop in the middle. Second, I fail to see how this has anything to do with having 18" of steel in your body. Those accounts pretty much all deal with more "superficial" wounds that don't go all the way through the body.

And even if I missed some of those accounts that deal with a deep wound, those accounts are still fringe cases in my opinion and don't necessarily represent the general case. Also, the more medically documented are those that were made by knives in modern times... Nothing like what a wound inflicted by a sword would be like.

Inquartata · 10-09-2003, 10:15 PM

You do realize that most parts of the human body are not more than 8" to 12" thick? Any vital organ is well within reach of a good knife thrust.

Several of the cases mentioned in the articles involved multiple through wounds to the body. Survived ones.

Most shootings, especially with military rifles ( and we have lots of statistics from wars ) are through penetrations. Many soldiers survive them. My father had a friend who was hit by machinegun fire in Korea. Three bullets entered one arm, passed through, entered one side of his chest, passed through his body and exited out the other side. He suffered a collapsed lung but survived, healed and was fine by the time I knew him in the mid-sixties. The scars were very impressive.

As to the exceptionality of the cases cited in the article, we cannot tell. Not all duels were recorded. But survived ones were common enough to make them a sizeable percentage of the ones that WERE written about...and enough to prompt a surgeon who was challenged to a duel appear on the field naked, in order to avoid a problem he had encountered so often in his professional capacity: that of a duellist surviving the fight only to die of infection and sepsis from bits of dirty clothing and the like being driven into the wounds by blades and bullets...