One of the true laws of making is improvement through repetition and iteration.
This shall be the tale of this deceptively simple style of sword pommel.
The wheel style pommel is a common sight on medieval European arming swords - what in the common tongue you may recognize more as 'knight sword'.
Its look is distinguished, stylish, without being gaudy; its function is effectively a comfortable counter-weight to the blade, and it excels at its job as a finely shaped hunk of mass at the butt end of a sword.
It is however not the easiest pommel to produce.
My first attempts at making them was hand-guiding them across my belt sander. I needn't go into detail about how irregular and inconsistent they would turn out. I won't even show pictures of those monstrosities.
A better way was needed.
The upgrade that changed it all wasn't even originally mine - my dad came up with it:
turning the faces on the lathe.It was brilliant, it was effective, and it was clean!
It did however have one distinct problem, the jaws of the chuck left teeth marks on the side of the pommel. A secondary issue was its grip strength, which was directly tied to those teeth marks.
Enter Phase 2 - a dedicated, comfort-fitting holding jig.
Something that would sit in the 4-jaw chuck and act as both clamp and buffer.
So was born The Puckvise 7000.
Features include: no mar holding, increased grip, quick release, modularity for different sized pommel pucks, and easy flipping of the workpiece.
Results of its first trial were a big success!
But this apparently did not satisfy enough! I wanted to make making the pommel even simpler!
So I spent the next two or three hours busting my brain on the process of turning it into a CNC job - shaping the blank puck with a toolpath that would cut the curved facets of the wheel pommel with robotic precision!
I managed to program it the hard way - doing all the math and vectoring, cross sectioning, measuring, dimensioning, drawing router bit geometry, and plotting every pass position and depth by hand like some kind of cybercaveman.
But in the end, no more would I have to manually gouge out the facets at the lathe, tediously scribing my limit lines and locating center, or holding on tight to dear mercy that I get the curve consistent between both faces...
Now I just clamp it into my New and Improved Puckvise 8000, load the file, and hit Go!
At this point the process becomes less woodwork and more glorified button pressing, but finally satisfied, I have also now gained yet another new capability for my CNC: a bit of 3D sculpture.
In the end, why go so far?
Because the alternative is to put on pants and go outside to the shed shop where I keep my lathe.
Forget that noise.
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