7/29/2011 Test cutting

[Will Adamson]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b-IMpNEh7g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfno1jDIVhU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwZGSmizI8E

Enjoy! More on the way soon.

[Jake Norwood]

Good to see some cutting! I like the "alternate" angles. That make me want to go do a few of these.

In the first video, it looks like the sword is flexing/whipping. Is that an optical illusion? Any chance we could see it in slo-mo?

[Will Adamson]

I saw that too. I looked at it frame by frame and it is whipping A LOT! Even though all longswords are supposed to flex some the Talhoffer is pretty stout. I did bend it a bit on something a few years ago, but I don't think that distortion is contributing to this whip since you can see the blade whipping the other direction on the recovery. Is this a bad thing? Does it show that my edge alignment is way off?

[ashultz]

You are putting more energy in than is necessary (see the position of your shoulder at the end of the cut), the whipping may be what is happening as you have to bring the cut to a stop having dumped so much energy into it rather than something that is happening from the cut itself. There's already a bend right before impact as you are still dumping energy in.

You're going to get that any time you really cut hard with a flexible (even only flexible like this fairly stiff albion) sword, it's just that usually you don't go quite so all out as this so there's less and usually we don't actually get an angle that makes it so obvious.

You're also definitely leading with the hands which probably makes the flex before cut much worse, maybe leading with the point you would have less. That's total supposition though, you'd have to learn to do both on demand and then take videos to show us whether that's true.