Well quite simply, and it had to be done, "That's not a knife, THIS is a knife!" Hi it's Tod from
Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we are going to talk about this. So what is it? Well
it is quite simply a giant Scottish Dirk done in the style of the early 18th century and what am I
doing with this thing? and did it even exist? and just there are so many questions. Well the first
thing I have to say is no it didn't exist so these giant sized Dirks, these sword sized dirks, these Swirks
were never a thing. But what it's really about is using this as a vehicle to talk about scale, size,
proportion. What you see in the museums. What you see in the reproduction market. What you want as
a customer, what I want to make as a maker who's passionate about history. Because this will allow
us to talk about that. So please join in the discussions because it's a really very real one.
So we're going to come back and look at another couple of daggers and swords and then we're going
to talk about this. I have a fist full of Tod Cutler daggers here, it's not sales pitch, this
is to explain what's going on. So we're going to start now with this quillon dagger here.
It's got a grip on it, it absolutely encloses your hand between the pommel and the guard, it
allows you a really secure grip. Really good edge alignment, you know where this knife is,
you know you're not going to let go of it. That is pretty much true to what you see in the museums.
Rondels like this one, very often a slightly longer grip probably because these were more likely to
be warn with gauntlets. Need a bit more room in it, but even so the gauntlet sometimes seems to
enclose over the top pommel so your whole top of your hand is completely armored, but it does
mean you need a slightly bigger grip. again this is pretty much true to what you find in museums.
Then we have a bollock dagger here. Handles again could be be quite small, but again it's the same
old story, you're locking your hand in. Really good edge alignment, really know that it's there
and it's staying there. When you look at this sort of thing, you don't look at that and go oh that's
the grip length. That's not the grip length, the grip length is the whole handle. That's really
how it is and you see that again and again in museums. And you will always see that argument
of "oh well people were smaller then", well actually on average probably quite a lot of people were, but
you know if you just chop off let's say 10 cm/4 inches off the average height, actually you can then
relate that to the average size of a hand and you'll find that actually the average width of
a hand was only sort of 5ish/6ish millimeters quarter of an inch, less maybe. At the worst case
scenario so that's not really why they're going for such small handles. And then we come to this
Dirk here. Now you look at that, you're probably fairly familiar with this kind of thing it is
a dirk sized dirk but actually it's not it's a cheat. That distance there is about a centimeter
and a half maybe a little bit more bigger than it should be, so it's small enough that it's held
dirk proportions and it looks like a dirk, it's still locks you in there exactly as the dirk
should be so it's it's a good knife. But it is in truth actually a longer grip than it should
be. But this is where it becomes difficult because if I made that with a very small grip a dirk sized
grip, people would look at the stats on the site and they would go "it's too small, I'm not buying
that". I have to make this different, little bit longer to be able to make my living and that's
an interesting choice I've made. Now on a long bladed knife not so difficult, shorter bladed
knives it becomes much harder but we're going to talk about that in a moment. So don't just
take my word for it, go get this book it is by the appropriately named John Wallace and if
you're interested in Scottish weapons and stuff fantastic. But we start with this one here and
it's a dirk and you go well that's all right you know you've got a proportionately sized handle. But
actually that's only a 12 1/2" inch blade so about the same size as that one I just showed you
and that means that that handle is really quite small. Now if we come to this picture here which
is number 58 and this is basically the target of this film here, nice early 18th century dirk it's
got the brass hilt to the bottom, brass pommel at the top and a little spacer in between. Quite a normal
style for that period. So what happens if you take this bone element here right which I can tell you
on the original is is just over 2 inches what happens if you scale that up to the far more reasonable
10 cm/4 inches? So you want a 4 inch grip. Most people go okay I want a 4in grip well, what you end up
with is this Swirk. It is this bonkers thing here. So that grip element is 10 cm if you look at those
pictures and you think this is what I need to grip this is what you end up with. All right, and it may
be lovely, I actually kind of like it, but it's not right. Now if I showed you a picture of that here
now you're probably looking at that and going well proportionately looks fine, but actually I've made
some really significant changes, really significant. So if we start with these two, have a look at them
they're basically scale of one and a scale of two on the height but that's kind of where it
ends because if I had doubled the width of that actual proper size dirk on the handle I'd end
up with something that I couldn't really hold, so actually I've taken it as big as I'm comfortable
with and it's still feeling okay in the hand, so then if we look at this element here the guard.
If I doubled that up on scale it's going to end up being around about 3 inches wide, same with the
pommel. That's going to give you so much mass in there it's just not really going to be functional.
And then we have the blade, again that was going to be about 3 and 1/4 in about 80 mm wide well
that's a wide blade it's not unheard of, but you scale it up and you go from about a 1/4 inch to
about a half inch, so from about 6 mm to about 12 mm. That again, especially on a single hander is
just not going to be tenable and I wanted this as an exercise to try and make a real object. So
this has been made for this film, it doesn't mean that it's just a prop, it really is a real weapon,
I made it to be a real weapon, I set out to make it a real weapon and that is really specific in
some of the choices and the changes I made. This is a usable sword which, you know it's got blade
presence, but it is a perfectly wieldable, perfectly usable sword and that was the idea behind it. But
to do that I had to make choices to make it look like a dirk. It says, it screams dirk at you, but the
sizes were never there, but you have to make these compromises in an extremely inflated,
exaggerated way here to show you really what is happening. When you make a choice as a weapons
reproducer, you have to make something that works. If I delivered to you a dirk with a 10 cm grip
this would be the result. Not quite right is it? So both of these objects visually say dirk, but what
happens when you laid them side by side with the original picture? So now you can see that
actually they are really quite different things. The Swirk obviously is a different case entirely, but
the smaller reproduction dirk dagger I did, you can see how that differs from the original and basically
how I'm trying to make it more appealing to what people think a modern usage of a knife should be
and how you grip it. So I made some subtle changes to the proportion of that dirk to try and make
it more sale-able. But actually dirks are relatively easy to deal with because they've got long blades
on them and the thing is the longer the blade, the more mass is out here to sort of counterbalance
the hilt so when you wear it in a sheath on your belt it stays upright. The shorter the blade, the
harder it is to get that balance, to keep the knife staying upright. But these size and proportion
changes are much easier when the blade is a bit longer and a dirk is a really good one for that, so
actually you can mess about with the proportions of a dirk and it doesn't make too much difference,
you can see it slightly in the grip length, but actually it still functions as a knife, it still
sits upright in a sheath which is of course what you want in a knife. You don't want it to
overbalance, with the exception of a few rondels in the late 15th C, but that's another film. The thing is
if we look at a dagger like this one here and we go "well I want a longer grip", if you go right well
I want to move that pommel up another inch, another 2 and a half cm, well now you've got a big mass
out the top there and that's much more lightly to overbalance your knife. So now when you put it
in a sheath on your belt it does that. Well that's no good. So what you do is you make the blade a
bit longer, well now proportionately it looks a bit odd, so you think well okay I'm going to have to
make the guard a bit wider, so you make the guard wider and now the handle looks skinny, so you make
the handle a little bit bigger and now actually the pommel looks like its too small again, it's just
this tiny little pimple on the end, so you have to make the pommel bigger, so now you make the pommel
bigger you got more mass there, so you're back to where you were and you think. "Well what I'll do is
I'll make a bigger blade". And then you'll do that and then you know what, sooner or later the person
doing that is going to give up and they're going to go "it's good enough", well you know what? It's not
good enough for me, because the thing is I think it has to function as a weapon so it has to actually
be right, it has to look nice because ugly things, are who wants them, you know? And it needs to look
like the things in museums and I think often that is the case where we're reproducing things and we
drift away from the core thing right at the beginning, "is what is the thing I am actually
trying to make", and the thing is let's not forget that the Medieval, Renaissance people who made
these, commissioned them, used them, trained with them, they lived and died by them, these were their
objects that they knew and trusted and used. Who am I to tell them that they got it wrong really?
Now I can fudge the odd detail to make something more sale-able, but fundamentally they designed
something the way it was because that was the way it needed to be. So really that's what it's
about, the dirk, the Swirk, this crazy big thing here. It's just a vehicle to talk about it and it's
kind of a fun thing and I enjoyed making it, but that aside I'm just going to do it one more time.
That's not a knife, that is a knife. Anyway I'll see you again, I hope you enjoyed it. Cheers