A look at possible design choices and the reasons behind them for blunt Messers – and some snide remarks.

Weapon: Calipers and AutoCAD (though it’ll focus on Messer)

Source: Antiques both in museums and private collections

This presentation will concentrate on why training tools break when there isn’t a verifiable material or manufacturing fault. It will address some material science and design topics with simplified models and will aim to utilize easy-to-understand analogues from everyday life.

Skill level of Participants: Any skill level
Needed Equipment: none

About the trainer – Adam Bodorics

I’m Adam Bodorics, CEO of Landsknecht Emporium. While I played with weapons for years, I didn’t have any time for it in the past 5-ish years. More importantly for this lecture, I’ve been making blades since I was 11, increasingly focusing on those strange knifelike things since around 2006. Since around 2015, the majority of pieces I made were sidearms with a knifelike hilt construction. In 2017, we founded a company, Landsknecht Emporium (the irony of still not having a Katzbalger on the website is not lost on me), to make kinda standardized models with a ton of possible variations – with all the edge, grip material, pommel and cross options, we have about 2000 possible variants not counting right- or left-handedness. Both the company and I as an individual craftsman approach designing and making our stuff based on originals as much as reasonably possible – more on the advantages and disadvantages of this approach in the lecture.