When you cut the tang too short....

[o4aversob]

Okay I'm an idiot. I cut the tang to short for any grip I own. Then I've come up with a brilliant idea (provided I don't fence in any official competitions). I take the tang from a broken blade, err.. weld it on to the short tang and take make it have threads and... voila!? Will it work? It shouldn't be any danger fencing with it right? WOuld weapons inspections notice anything?

[wflaschka]

I'm not sure about the safety of welding a tang. Were the weld to break, it would break in the handle -- inconvenient, but not dangerous. Perhaps somebody else knows better. I've never heard of anybody ever following through on their plan to weld a blade.

As for the too-short tang -- you could try selling the blade to another fencer, such as a kid who uses a size 0 handle, or a fencer who likes to cut their handles short. Worst case scenario, make a fencing target with an adjustable arm.

[downunder]

m.12
2. All methods of soldering or brazing or in general any heating which may affect the temper of the blade are forbidden.

[Mergs]

If you welding the cut portion of the blade back on, it would most likely be hidden by the grip. I used to have to drill out the hole in my pistol grips to .50" in order to get my 8mm deepwell socket to fit. You can use this method to make the hole deep enough to catch enough threads on the tang to secure the grip on. A rule of thumb I use in design is that you need at least 1.5 x the nominal diameter worth of thread engagement to get the full strength of the fastener. For a standard tang this would be 9mm of thread engagement. The problem with this is that you will need a sizeable stack of washers to use the modified grip with a standard blade (unless it is threaded far enough down; you can do this yourself, too). Good luck.

[DHCJr]

Originally posted by downunder
quote:
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m.12
2. All methods of soldering or brazing or in general any heating which may affect the temper of the blade are forbidden.
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This rule of course would not apply, since we are talking about the tang, not the blade. When they apply this rule it is for the foible. Most tangs are welded on at the factory. Many of the forges of the former Soviet Union made Sabre blades which if you tried to cant would break right at the weld. They would get thrown away. Carl Oberg (Oberg Guage) would re-weld them at a cant and would use them in his classes for his students.

There is nothing in the rules for welding on the tang.

[Duelist71]

I agree with Mergs, drill out the inside of one of your handles. I have done this for a few fencers when they have switched grips and found there tang cut to short for the new grip. Welding the tang would work to, but drilling the handle is a lot less trouble.

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!

If you have a shop with good set of stuff, you may try to put together the parts again. I have not tried this, but it may work:

1. Put blade, tang up, in a vise. Apply liberal amount of chemically stable industrial grease to threading.
2. Thread on nuts on the short tang until the last one extends above the tang end. Use extra high nuts. In the shop of my company, the are nuts that have a height=6*diameter. Try to find them in a hardware shop for professionals. See to it that the threading of the nuts is liberally greased.
3. Thread in the sawed off part of the tang into the last nut. This tang part shall also be greased.
4. Thread on more greased nuts on the sawed off part, so that a sizeable portion of its threading is covered.
5. Secure the highest nut with a split washer.
6. Put two strips of steel on opposing sides of the nuts.
7. Clamp (or spot-weld) the strips to the nuts.
8. Clamp the lower end of the strips to the unthreaded end of the tang, close to the forte.

Both tang parts are now paralell, and their threadings will work together. There is a small separation at the sawed place.

9. Drill a hole through both parts of the tang. The diameter shall be so that the wall thickness is sufficient, but big enough for a significant steel axle. This drilling must be paralell and concentric to the axis of the tangs, so a machine support is necessary.
10. Cut a section of steel axle with somewhat smaller diameter than the hole. The length shall be long enough to extend out of the hole with a few centimeters to spare.
11. Fix the axle in the chuck of a power drill.
12. Hold a piece of emery paper to one side - not around - the steel axle. Start the power drill, and the axle will be polished. Do this at low speed, as there is a safety risk. The axle is now clean and somewhat rough, ensuring good adherence.
13. Use a 2-component expoxi of high strength, and fill in the base chemical into the hole. If necessary, use a stick to get it to fill in.
14. Dip the clean steel axle in the epoxi primer. Put into the expoxi-base filled hole, and pull it up a down a few times to ensure good mixture between base and primer. Push it down, and let stay.
15. Let stay until the epoxi is hardened.
16. Take away the clamp at the bottom of the tang.
17. Unscrew the steel strips and nuts as one unit. If everything goes right, the greasing should make this easy. The lower nuts will form the threading in the epoxi part.

You now have a long tang again. Canting will be difficult but is maybe possible if you see to it that you only grip at the inner part of the tang, so that the epoxi in not loaded. The upper part of the tang can now be sawed off to right length, but it is probably best to put on several nuts inside the intended sawing place to act as stiffeners. When mounted, the epoxied tang will only be subjected to pure compression, which is a load mode it can well stand.

If you rather mix around with your handle, it is probably less time consuming to deepen the exit hole in the handle with a drill. Given the irregular shape of a pistol grip, this may necessitate building of a support.

Have nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[swordsen]

Generally you are doomed if this happens. (As I have learned through sad experience.) but once just as an experiment I extended the tang on such a blade by useing a grindning wheel to grind down about half an inch off the base of the blade thus extending the tang. It worked but was way too much work to do on anything like a regular basis.

[laughingduelist]

Welding works just fine. I have converted a number of blades from a pistol grip to a french using this method. It's legal as well.

[Hyperion1250]

I've contemplated making a handle (french, not too hard) and threading it, so you screw it on, and then take a bit of the tang off an old blade and attaching a pommel to it. Though i have a feeling it wouldn't work too well

[laughingduelist]

I've contemplated making a handle (french, not too hard) and threading it, so you screw it on, and then take a bit of the tang off an old blade and attaching a pommel to it. Though i have a feeling it wouldn't work too well

Works just fine. Just cut a bit of tang off a broken blade and weld it on.

[MyraTrue]

erm... I may be missing something, but drummel your grip.

Seriously, if this is a case where you cut the tang too short and cannot reach the threads to put on the nut, use a drill press or a drummel tool to deepen the er... hole? in the grip. I had to do it once with a blade I'd bought that had been cut for a small to medium Visconti grip, and I wanted to put a German grip on it. I couldn't reach the threads by about 1/8 of an inch. And Saul at The Fe\ncing Post suggested (since I bought the grip from him) that I do this. And it worked.

Which means no welding, no debates of if its legal (unless its considered alteration of a grip, but I doubt that).

Er... I hope this helps, somewhat. And that I didn't completely miss something in all this.

[Pleocoma]

erm... I may be missing something, but drummel your grip.

Seriously, if this is a case where you cut the tang too short and cannot reach the threads to put on the nut, use a drill press or a drummel tool to deepen the er... hole? in the grip. I had to do it once with a blade I'd bought that had been cut for a small to medium Visconti grip, and I wanted to put a German grip on it. I couldn't reach the threads by about 1/8 of an inch. And Saul at The Fe\ncing Post suggested (since I bought the grip from him) that I do this. And it worked.

Which means no welding, no debates of if its legal (unless its considered alteration of a grip, but I doubt that).

Er... I hope this helps, somewhat. And that I didn't completely miss something in all this.

Hi,

I have the same basic problem as posted above, only thing different is I'm putting a Belgian grip on a Visconti cut blade. Is there anything I should know before drilling? I'm looking for as much info as I can get first, because it's not my blade

[CvilleFencer]

As said, just get a good sized bit (7/16 is a good middle of the road choice for most grips) and drill the grip out. For future reference, measure first by putting the grip on the blade before wiring, mark it with a sharpie and cut smart.

[parrythis]

Two questions:

1) What kind of grip?
2) How much too short is the tang?

If it is an orthopedic grip, MyraTrue's advice should work:

use a drill press or a drummel tool to deepen the er... hole? in the grip...

The other option is to shorten the grip. Take the grip in your hand and hold it like you normally would. If the grip extends beyond where your thumb and forefinger are gripping it, you can take up to that much material off without affecting how you hold it. If the amount that the tang is too short is less than the amount of material you can remove from the front of the grip, you might be able to shorten it enough that you will be able to get a nut on the threads again.

[Purple Fencer]

Send the weapon and new grip to me....I have a drill press and an end mill for exactly this situation.

You don't want to just use a standard drill bit to deepen the recess....the resulting table for the nut will not be flat....it'll be angled and leave nothing for the nut or washer to grab onto...it may even result in you cranking the nut INTO the recess instead of on top of it....the grip would never be tight.

An end mill leaves a nice flat table for the washer/nut to sit on and tighten against.

[Nolano]

I've welded tangs back on. They've held up fine.

Note that I TIG welded them, so the beads were small and fine, and I prepped them for welding in a way to ensure maximum penetration.

[Alex_Paul]

drill the grip out, it is fer easier IMO.

[Soberin]

drill the grip out, it is fer easier IMO.

Drilling the grip out is ok, but as posted above, you may have to shorten the grip. Every time I have tried to fix a tang cut too short ( not often ) the grip had to be cut down, and was useless, as the hand was too big to fit properly.

[TodG]

Brazing is plenty strong. I built many swords with tangs that are brazed on with silver braze that have been used to hack down trees. Typically a tang will break on the threads, which is why most swords intended for actual combat used peened tangs.

If you are worried about drawing the temper (annealing) the root of the blade, which takes a lot of heat and won't effect much anyway, you can use stop heat paste.

It really depends on if you think the trouble is worth the cost of the blade.