Just figured it would be a fun idea and may help out a few people to see whats the lightest weight we can get for each weapon fie and non-fie, for the first iteration I'm mainly going for leon paul items as they have all the weights listed so it eases things, but if anyone has an idea of any other weights that would be awesome. Starting off with sabre: Blade: Z-Pro Sabre blade http://www.leonpaul.com/z-pro-sabre-blade.html 150g Guard: Titanium "Szilagyi" http://shop.pbtfencing.com/fencing-...-sabre-guard-insulated-titanium-szilagyi.html 70g Grip: Classic Wooden Sabre Handle http://www.leonpaul.com/classic-wooden-sabre-handle.html 22g Socket: Light weight Bayonet socket http://www.leonpaul.com/lw-shorted-sabre-bayonet-socket.html 11g 2-Pin sabre socket http://www.leonpaul.com/shorted-sabre-2-pin-socket.html 20g Pommel:Insulated Sabre Pommel http://www.leonpaul.com/insulated-sabre-pommel.html 17g Around 285g with bayonet socket 294 g with 2 pin socket Epee Blade: LP- Fie/Non-FIE blade 150g Guard: FWF Ultralight titanium epee guard 72g Grip and pommel: LP slimline pure carbon french grip and nut 42g Socket: LP Light weight epee socket 21g Pad:15g Wires and tip: around 6 g Around 306g for both fie and non-fie Foils They are all light anyway.
For epee, I use the following Blade: BF FIE (a personal preference) Guard: Schermasport (slightly heavier and more durable than a FWF Titanium ultralight guard, 86 gm vs 74 gm), Grip and pommel: Harut wooden Grand Prix with a Rick Zehr's 3D printed pommel (a personal preference Socket: LP lightweight socket Tip: LP Titanium barrel with FWF tip and springs, NEPS screws Approximate total weight = 375 to 390 gm. The differences is weight are probably in the full tang length of the blade and the solid blade type. I didn't like the feel of the LP folded metal blade construction when I parried (or beat) with the weapon. You want a light epee, but not too light. You want some mass if your blade is parried or beat. Think of if as heavy car runs into a light compact car. The light car going to get tossed around a lot more than a slightly heavier car.
I do use a lot of light weight stuff on my epees, in fact anything in front of the fulcrum, so that is everything but the pommel, for that I have 150g LP pommels. So yes this isn't as light as it culd be but the balance is much better making the weapon feel lighter and giving a much more precise point. I do have a 200g pommel which gives a balance point just inside the guard, the point control with this is amazingly precise but their is a trade off on speed which is why I personally favour the 150g pommels.
I got an LP Mag-Tec (?) titanium orthopedic handle some time ago and, all other components being equal, it seemed to lighten the overall weight of the epee.
This is the lightest epee I've been able to actually construct. It's an LP blade, FWF Ultralight bell, custom carbon grip. That's using a full tang blade, which weighs a bit more than the pistol grip tang the LP grip takes, but I'm not sure that makes up all the difference. My grip is almost exactly the weight of the LP; if we're down to worrying about five and ten grams, you have to include the bell pad too, which is 15g or so. At any rate, until someone shows me an actual 285g epee that's ready to fence with, including grip tape and bell pad and all that, I'm going to be a little dubious. Weights on web pages can be a bit optimistic, and things add up. I think "Is a very light epee a good idea" is somewhat orthogonal to OP's question of how to construct the lightest epee possible, don't you?
Fair enough I'll add a 15g for padding. But yeah for pretty much the same type of parts the weight should add up to 320 g is ; I guess all parts have an error of around 8% to their actual weights.
If you have a estimates weight value for these; that would be cool and I'll just have it there as a fixed variable.
I'm going to practice today, so I can post a bunch of weights if you like. I have some factory wired fg LP non-FIE blades, wired StM FIE blades, FWF light bells, Vniti bells, LP sockets, clear pads, etc.
That would be awesome; may even give the opportunity to make a mini database of different items an their weights.
Ok, so: Factory wired LP blades fg non-FIE 170.9 169.5 173.3 175 167.5 174.2 171.3 173.9 LP socket 21.4 21.4 Absolute clear pad 13.7 Vniti bell 109 110.4 112.5 110.5 114.4 111.1 FWF Ti bell 73.1 73.5 73.9 72.8 Those are french grip blades, though, and I didn't think to weigh a cutoff to see how much to subtract to get a pistol grip weight. The LP carbon grip uses a pistol grip blade. I think it's about 20g, but that's from memory. So from the parts above, the lightest epee I could make with my full-tang carbon grip would be: blade 167.5 bell 72.8 socket 21.4 pad 13.7 grip 42.3 total 317.7 Which is about what I got in my epee above. But the LP carbon grip would cut the weight of the tang out, which might get you down near 300g or so. A super thin felt pad would probably get you to 290g, but honestly when you start worrying about the weight of the pad even I think it's time to move on
If you want to be really technical LP has a lightweight epee tip that's supposed to be around 2g lighter. They claim it's enough of a reduction to make a difference because it's so far out on the blade.
Could probably with a bit of physics,maths and matlab caculate the timing of the hit being registered from the initiation of the attack of different weighted swords, of course with a lot of assumptions and not factoring alot of other important elements and so on, but I'm quite sure at best 2g will do nothing more than reducing the timing by like 1 or 2 millisecond or so.
It's not actually a Ti tip, it's a barrel, and the improvement is in the ability to swing and position the blade faster and more accurately, and to accelerate the weapon a little quicker. A bit of back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that as far as balance of the weapon, the Ti barrel would need around 15g less weight at the (French) pommel to balance it, vs. their standard barrel. So think of it as potentially reducing the weapon weight by around a half-ounce.
And by "reality" Einstein meant "fencing." Seriously. I like math. My degrees are in math. I teach math to undergrads. This is a very hard problem to actually model in any kind of exact way and get any useful data out of. For example, if you just think about the static balance of the weapon, you're ignoring rotational inertia. Ok, but if you model the rotational inertia (the integral of R^2 dm, so the reduced weight of the tip would matter rather a lot), you're ignoring the flexibility of the weapon. So, play with it a bit. Tape a fishing weight to the tip of your epee. The epee will flop all over. Put a grip on a bare blade, with no point at all (be careful! Treat it like it's sharp. Seriously.) Suddenly the epee seems super quick, but also super stiff. There's no lag, it just zips where you point it. Reducing weight on the end of the epee makes the blade effectively stiffer for the purposes of moving it around, without making it hit harder. High level fencers want the stiffest blades possible. This is a way to make an effectively stiffer blade, legally. Notice that this doesn't predict that the weapon will hit one or ten or fifty milliseconds sooner. The probably actual effect is that it will hit when the other epee would not hit at all, or the other way around. Effectively slightly stiffer, slightly quicker, less able to flick, more point control, etc. All this is papered over if you just look at a couple of simple descriptive equations that treat the epee like a rigid rod. Anyway, the best idea with stuff like this is just to try it. If the LP Ti barrel is 2g less, that's about like fencing with a normal point but with no tip in the barrel. Go do some drills with no tip, fence a dry bout, see if you notice a difference. If you really want the lightest point on the epee, you might consider: Standard FWF epee barrel: 4.3g LP standard barrel: 4.2g LP Ti light barrel: 2.3g (from web site) LP tip: 1.9g Zip tip: 1.2g You can shave another .7g by using a zip tip in a LP Ti barrel.
Please do not fence a bout, or drill with a live partner, with no tip in your barrel. A tip is designed not to puncture your opponent; an empty barrel is not.
True the maths isn't the easiest to model but that is why it's best to make whatever assumptions you feel is most reasonable for you. I'll be honest I had the same issue with my engineering degree at the start when I tried to design something and spent days and days trying to figure out how to deal with these 1 or two variables that i couldn't account for and decided to end my misery and ask a professor...and his answer was just assume it; it was super confusing to me at the time as I always figured fine margins can be major in terms of safety; but alas this is life. But Yeah that's kind of a coincidence of a thought though because yesterday I picked out a club epee randomly and was like OMG this is so light even though it was exactly the same as the others until I found out the tip was just a shell and the springs e.t.c fell out, so I guess even a gram on the tip can make a major difference to the feel of the weight.