The final project report for Safety Tips Phase 1, detailing our approach, equipment, results and recommendations. Made freely available to the HEMA community – feel free to share!
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5 responses to “Safety Tips Phase 1 – Project Results v1”
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I use a rubber tip that has a dome circle rather than a flat shape with a circle ridge and put a bright slippery tape on the whole thing so it will slide off on a hit. With the flat rubber tips even if you sand down the outer ridge mound you are more likely to catch which is good for scoring points but bad for who you’re hitting.
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I’m reasonably confident that shape is a factor here, but also that material itself is a major contribution. The bullet case had a similar shape to the rubber tip with no issues on sticking to the mask. Shape is definitely something we’d like to explore in future phases. If you can share the brand of tip you use that would be helpful!
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Thanks for doing this work. I note that, in the rapier, your ‘control’ was a rounded tip. In the longsword, you also had rolled and spatulate tips.
Did you cover rolled or spatulate tips for rapiers? If you did, I’m struggling to find it. Obviously, the thermoplastic tip will improve the safety of any blade but what difference does it make to these blades with ‘safety’ tips?-
Your can’t find it because we didn’t do it. We went in to the experiment day with 4 possible experiments: one of the options we didn’t do was to rerun similar tests with a rolled tip rapier vs plastic and rubber tips (bullet cases don’t fit on it). It wasn’t as easy as just doing the tests with the other rapier as it’s also more flexible, but we hoped this would give us some insight into the effect of flex.
Unfortunately time and resources meant we only could do 2 of the planned experiments. This was a full 2 days of testing (we finished up 7pm Sunday) but I’d definitely like to retest.
That being said – the rolled and flared tips we tested for longsword still underperformed on the puncture test compared to the rapier with bullet case, even with the SIGI light which has the same flex as the rapier. If I had to guess, I’d expect rolled to perform at best similarly to – or more likely slightly worse than – the bullet case
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Hi, ty for the research.
I tried the plastic tip on my Longsword (t shaped end, fit just fine), I appreciated the increase in safety for thrusts, but the tip rapidly broke off because of side shocks after few bouts…ended up having to stop fencing.
It was not taped, so this probably played a major role (more wiggling around the tip) but do you have more experiences or reports on how long lasting plastic tips are for more cutting oriented fencing? I figure that not being rubbery the shock absorption is not good as the rubber tip, which by itself is not a problem – better the tip than the partner – but replacement is not fast and if you’re not at home you may end up tipless. Did someone come up with solutions like quick molding or serial casting that worked well to solve this issue?
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