Esker Forge
Esker Forge
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Our Design Philosophy

Our goal is to bring you the best fencing tools available. To do this, we use a fundamental understanding of historical sword design and modern fencing needs. The result is swords that feel unlike any other, and are more true to history.

Historical swords were sporty

To design the geometry of The Standard, we wrote our own software to model the flexibility and handling properties of a well-balanced longsword while varying many potential dimensions. When we cross-referenced our findings against measurements of historical examples of fencing swords, the results surprised us.

We found historical examples of German Renaissance fencing swords, or fechtschwert, were highly competitive as modern fencing weapons. They were lighter and had closer point of balance than modern feders, but also rigid and strong in the bind. This makes sense - fencing was a sport!

The key characteristic was a thickness of at least 6mm in the early sections of the sword on nearly every example. Modern federschwert are significantly thinner than this, leading to floppy swords that are weak in the bind. This discourages historically competitive techniques (we're looking at you, Meyer) from seeing use in modern competition.

Rigidity increases with the cube of thickness, meaning an increase from 5mm to 6.3mm of thickness will double it. We are reviving this crucial aspect of historical geometry to bring you the most performant two-handed fencing sword on the market.
Perfect replicas of KZ 1029, KZ 1030, and KZ 193 by Cyrill Hamm
Our analysis of the effect of incremental mass changes on various properties of an early Standard prototype

Optimal geometry for modern fencing

HEMA is a living art. Our goal is not to perfectly replicate something from a museum. The smiths of these blades were producing the best weapons they could, and we continue that tradition. Our goal is to truly understand why historical examples have the properties they do, and use their lessons to create the sword we believe the old masters would want to make were they alive today.

Safety is of key importance to us. A rigid sword strong in the bind does not require sacrificing flexibility. The Standard is flexible at under 12 kg of force, measured from the crossguard and including the sword weight, which gives higher values but more accurately reflects a real thrust. We find this flex is comparable to light feders.

When designing The Standard, we focused on KZ 1029 and KZ 1030 at the Landesmuseum in Zürich, which weigh 1450g and 1330g (the one at the Met is 1332g). While the mass of The Standard is in line with these values, our point of balance is a bit further (though still on the low end for modern swords). These historical examples have an extremely thin spatulated tip design which would easily take sets - the steel necessary for flexible thrusts was not available to these makers. This very thin tip minimizes angular inertia. Nonetheless, we were informed by aspects of their design to reduce the sword mass and bring the point of balance as close as possible.

Being lighter, more rigid, and somehow more flexible, we believe this fechtschwert is a no-compromises improvement on existing federschwert.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank researchers Cyrill Hamm and Julian Ronneberger for their complete dynamic measurements of historical fechtschwert examples KZ 1029 and KZ 1030, and also for producing accurate replicas of these blades and reporting their fencing characteristics. We also thank Daniel Jaquet for basic geometric measurements of these swords. Thank you to researchers Florian Fortner and Julian Schrattenecker (https://www.rapier.at/) for their measurements of many historical longsword examples, in particular the ones taken from the Gotti collection in collaboration with Karl Rapp.