Champagne Saber

I'm sure at some point you've heard about various people, in an act of showmanship opening a bottle of champagne with a sword. Called "Sabrage" They rapidly slide the sword along the bottle, towards the cork, where it contacts with the glass lip. Since the contents are under pressure, the entire top of the bottle pops off, and champagne spills everywhere. Here is a video:

After a trip to Napa Valley with my wife and her parents, my father-in-law expressed some interest in trying this out. So I got in my head to try and make a saber meant for sabrage.

The first design decision I had to make was to the length of the saber. Typical sabers can be over 3 feet in length. But longer swords pose many more challenges that shorter ones. Since the sword is merely for opening bottles, I decided to keep it on the short side. Its over all length is 20".

A typical saber has a curve that extends across the whole length of the blade. Since I'm not forging this blade, and instead I'm using stock removal, getting that strong curve is difficult. You have to start with stock that is wide enough to fit the entire curved blade. The steel I had access to was only 2" wide. I tried to add a curve, but you'll notice in later pictures that it only really curved towards the tip of the blade. I accidentally cut too much off the back of the blade when I was shaping the profile.  Here is an original sketch for the blades profile. I'm a firm believer in the idea that "If you can't draw it, you can't make it". So I sketch out nearly every thing until the shape looks like how I want the final product to be.

If I were a real knife making shop, I would buy (Or make) myself a proper 2" x 72" belt grinder. With a sufficiently powerful motor that can have its speed adjusted, there is nothing better. Some day I'll get around to that, but in the mean time I bought a cheap Wen 1 " x 30" belt grinder that seemed to do just fine. It was able to grind the bevels flat and evenly, and it shaped the profile well enough. It is slow, but you still get decent results.

One important downside, since it doesn't have an adjustable speed, it is way too fast for me to trust it to do any post heat treating work. I would worry that it would ruin the temper with all the heat from the friction. If I really needed to I could keep a bucket of water to cool it down between strokes. But that would probably be more work than it saves using the powered grinder.

Something I Learned:  When grinding the bevels on the blade, I used a pretty coarse belt. This quickly removed material. However, it left some pretty severe gashes in the steel. Gashes that proved to be very difficult to remove by hand. Since I ground the bevels all the way to their final shape, removing the gashes meant I would have to grind past the final shape that I intended. Next time, I'm going to use the coarse belt for the coarse shaping, then switch to a finer belt to finish the shape. This should easily remove the gashes, and leave smaller scratches that can be removed later. If I had an adjustable speed belt grinder, I could  wait till after the heat treating to finish grinding the bevels down to a sharp edge, which should accomplish the same thing but with fewer steps.


After the profile of the blade has been completely shaped, and the bevels ground down (Leaving about 1/16" on the edge) the blade is ready to heat treat. It's important to leave a little thickness on the blade edge before heat treating. There is always a chance that the blade will snap when quenched, but leaving a little extra material helps mitigate that risk.

The in-laws gave us one of their old kilns to do some glass working. But it's the perfect thing for heat treating blades.

The quench tank was a little more complicated than I thought it would be. Many people all over suggest using old cut open fire extinguishers, or welding a cap onto one end of a large diameter pipe. None of these suggestions were very accessible to me. I just wanted something simple and easy. So my wife and I went to Walmart, and we found the perfect thing.

A wide and shallow galvanized steel bucket meant for holding ice with bottles/cans to serve during parties. It holds 3 gallons of oil, and it is long enough to quench the whole blade. It's perfect.

Something I learned: I tried to think of all the ways to use as little oil as possible. Small thin quench tanks, etc. But It's important to have enough oil to absorb all the heat, otherwise you'll end up with a poor quench, and it won't reach full hardness. I read somewhere that the rule of thumb is 1 gallon of oil to 1 lb of steel. 

 

 I used 1084 steel for my blade. So heat treating was as simple as getting it up past non magnetic to 1500 then dunking it right into the oil. Here it is post quench. I tempered it to 500 degrees. My hypothesis is that a softer temper will be less likely to crush the glass at the contact point, which means less crushed glass flying every where.

 

One distinctive feature of a saber is the hand guard. It's typically made of brass, and rather ornate. Often it's a "basket" guard, where it partially wraps around the users hand. I really liked this look, and I happened to have a sheet of brass in my shop that was largely unused.

After many attempts at drawing the hand guard out, I finally came to a design I liked. It's remarkably simpler than what I started drawing, but I think it turned out nice.

To transfer the pattern to the brass, I cut it out of paper to scale, and traced it with a carbide scribe. Remember, it's important to secure the pattern to the material as best you can. Since it's paper, it slides around and you'll get a really bad transfer, like I did. :( It may have been better for me to use graphite paper and then scribed along the lines.

I had to buy a larger fret saw to cut this pattern out. I normally use a jewelers saw, which works fine for most things. But the depth of cut that I had to make made it impossible to do with a small saw.

I didn't get many pictures of the whole build, but here it is gluing the hand guard on. 

Closer shot of the hand guard. Polishing it proved to be difficult, so instead I used steel wool to give it a brushed look. 

One thing to note about this hand guard, it's a really poor design if you're going for durability. It's secured to the sword with epoxy at 3 different points. The epoxy should hold well enough, but it's pretty likely that it will fail under some amount of stress. Normal saber hand guards actually attach to the sword by molding around the grip. Which provides a much more secure hand guard.


After the final glue up was done, I did a quick detailing with some steel wool, and the sword is finished! Here are pictures of the sword at different angles.

Oh, and then we of course had to try it out