Ottoman saber/Kilij Project

[Alex Jemetz]

Working to improve my skills and create something that will keep me keenly focused, I've decided to replicate a saber that the Ottoman Turks and the Ukrainian Kozaks used in battle--the Pala.  I'm using 5160 truck leaf-spring kindly donated by a local truck-spring repair shop.  Picture attached is my lofty goal, steep learning curve for me but the heart desires a saber of this type.  All comments and criticism is welcome, especially if you've made something similar and can impart some advice.  Also attached are pics of the initial forging into shape of the steel.

[Eric Estlund]

Great start!

 

Are you going for the full t back?

[JPH]

Hello:

 

Looks like you have a decent enough start...the one thing to look for is that these blade shapes can warp like the Devil  You can lessen this by making sure you forge each side evenly..(Count your blows on each side)..This should lessen it..also..these blades really benefit from a differential temper..Ie, soft springy back/spine and harder edge. The Yelman improves impact during the cut as well.. Here are several photos of one I did for book IV (I am making another one with a bit of a different grip...this new one will be the same wavy feather pattern steel but with an Impala horn grip and a Eastern European "sabre" type guard and pommel).

These can be a lot of fun to make but they can also be somewhat frustrating.. Hint..Harden point down unless you want additional curvature in the blade...

 

Good luck..Like I said looking good so far...

 

JPH

[Alex Jemetz]

On 1/29/2025 at 8:33 PM, Eric Estlund said:

Great start!

 

Are you going for the full t back?

Hi Eric, I'm hoping to try to make the T-spine but am still thinking about what kind of tool to use or invent to make it with.  It's quite a complex fuller-to-T-spine transition but looks incredible and I'm certain reduces a lot of mass.  I'm thinking of using a very large carbide drill bit to make a fuller scraper.

[Alex Jemetz]

On 1/30/2025 at 12:46 PM, JPH said:

Hello:

 

Looks like you have a decent enough start...the one thing to look for is that these blade shapes can warp like the Devil  You can lessen this by making sure you forge each side evenly..(Count your blows on each side)..This should lessen it..also..these blades really benefit from a differential temper..Ie, soft springy back/spine and harder edge. The Yelman improves impact during the cut as well.. Here are several photos of one I did for book IV (I am making another one with a bit of a different grip...this new one will be the same wavy feather pattern steel but with an Impala horn grip and a Eastern European "sabre" type guard and pommel).

These can be a lot of fun to make but they can also be somewhat frustrating.. Hint..Harden point down unless you want additional curvature in the blade...

 

Good luck..Like I said looking good so far...

 

JPH

WOW!  Stunning craftsmanship!  I hope to make a saber like yours!  I'm grateful for your advice.  Can you tel me how you made the fullers and was it before or after working the curve into the blade.  Thank you for responding!

[JPH]

21 hours ago, Alex Jemetz said:

 Can you tel me how you made the fullers and was it before or after working the curve into the blade. 

 

Hello:  Simple answer is both..In straight blades fullers are pretty much problem free.. you hammer them in and then after all the forging is done...go in and clean them up.. On a curved blade there is a little more work..I put in a "starter" fuller..I go about 3/4 the way to being done while the blade is straight...then I do the curve, after that I go back and clean that up and even them out a bit and get them all nice and pretty again after the curve does its "damage' to the fuller.

 

Fullering really makes the blade "look finished" if you ask me...If you get stuck doing them...drop me a note and I might be able to help you out.. I have been doing this stuff for 50 plus years now  ( geeze I am getting old..gotta get that 4th book done before I become a shade..) so I do know a few tricks on doing some things...

 

JP ( where's my Geritol) H

[Alan Longmire]

If you're a true masochist, the best way to do a T-back I've seen is to forge it in and scrape to finish.  Way back in 2004 I saw the late Larry Harley and Howard Clark do a T-back Khyber blade this way.  You will need a vise that can stand hammering and a small ball peen hammer.  An acetylene torch really helps, but isn't absolutely required.

 

Forge the profile and bevels plus any fullers almost to finished, because once you upset the spine you can't change anything else.

 

Bring the blade up to heat and clamp it in the vise with the spine up, then with a series of rapid light blows with the ball end of the ball peen, start spreading the spine.  If you have a torch, you don't have to keep putting the blade back in the forge.  You will need to straighten it every so often, especially if you're hitting too hard. That can make the blade curve up more than you want. Use great care to keep the blade centered, it's easy to get the spine wider on one side or the other.

 

Once you have the spine significantly thicker than the rest of the blade, clean it up and normalize. Use scrapers to clean up the underside of the T and the resulting fullers.    

 

This works well on smaller blades, and I imagine it would on sword-length blades as well, just be a much bigger headache.  

 

I didn't realize just how good those Indo-Persian smiths were until I saw a little T-back Choora.  It wasn't wootz, but the blade itself was incredibly thin, like 0.9 mm just below the T-back tapering down to nothing at the edge.  The spine was a good 4mm wide and less than 0.5mm thick, made it look like half an I-beam in cross section.  A sword of course will be a bit thicker, but the same principles apply.

[Alex Jemetz]

4 hours ago, JPH said:

 

Hello:  Simple answer is both..In straight blades fullers are pretty much problem free.. you hammer them in and then after all the forging is done...go in and clean them up.. On a curved blade there is a little more work..I put in a "starter" fuller..I go about 3/4 the way to being done while the blade is straight...then I do the curve, after that I go back and clean that up and even them out a bit and get them all nice and pretty again after the curve does its "damage' to the fuller.

 

Fullering really makes the blade "look finished" if you ask me...If you get stuck doing them...drop me a note and I might be able to help you out.. I have been doing this stuff for 50 plus years now  ( geeze I am getting old..gotta get that 4th book done before I become a shade..) so I do know a few tricks on doing some things...

 

JP ( where's my Geritol) H

Thank you for explaining your process JPH, and I agree the blade looks more finished and detailed with a fuller.  I will look for you books on-line...  

[Alex Jemetz]

2 hours ago, Alan Longmire said:

If you're a true masochist, the best way to do a T-back I've seen is to forge it in and scrape to finish.  Way back in 2004 I saw the late Larry Harley and Howard Clark do a T-back Khyber blade this way.  You will need a vise that can stand hammering and a small ball peen hammer.  An acetylene torch really helps, but isn't absolutely required.

 

Forge the profile and bevels plus any fullers almost to finished, because once you upset the spine you can't change anything else.

 

Bring the blade up to heat and clamp it in the vise with the spine up, then with a series of rapid light blows with the ball end of the ball peen, start spreading the spine.  If you have a torch, you don't have to keep putting the blade back in the forge.  You will need to straighten it every so often, especially if you're hitting too hard. That can make the blade curve up more than you want. Use great care to keep the blade centered, it's easy to get the spine wider on one side or the other.

 

Once you have the spine significantly thicker than the rest of the blade, clean it up and normalize. Use scrapers to clean up the underside of the T and the resulting fullers.    

 

This works well on smaller blades, and I imagine it would on sword-length blades as well, just be a much bigger headache.  

 

I didn't realize just how good those Indo-Persian smiths were until I saw a little T-back Choora.  It wasn't wootz, but the blade itself was incredibly thin, like 0.9 mm just below the T-back tapering down to nothing at the edge.  The spine was a good 4mm wide and less than 0.5mm thick, made it look like half an I-beam in cross section.  A sword of course will be a bit thicker, but the same principles apply.

The method of making a T-back is very interesting, I would not of though of using a small ball-peen hammer to work on the spine of the saber...  I though it was painstakingly done with a scraper...  Thank you for your valid advice!  I'm sure to be coming back to you with more questions...

[Alan Longmire]

The mechanics of forging play a large role in why historical blade shapes are the way they are.  The small hammer with many light blows spreads the steel fast and shallow.  A heavier hammer hits deeper into the steel and upsets where you don't want it to.  The ball peen spreads steel fast in all directions, so ideally you'd use a small cross peen parallel to the spine, but you have to have really good aim to do that.  Once you have enough width established you can switch to a cross peen.  

 

Or you could start with a full-thickness blank and use fullering tools to thin down the blade while leaving the spine thick.  That's how the French did their quill-backed sabre blades.  Many ways to approach the problem.  Just remember, where we today tend to go with subtractive shaping, i.e. cutting and grinding off what we don't want, back in the day they tended to do additive shaping, welding on parts or forging to shape via upsetting, drawing, fullering (in the blacksmith sense, not the knifemaker sense), and so on. 

 

Until the 1850s steel was very expensive and came in small chunks.  We're used to having honking big bars to work down today, but prior to the 1850s in the West we had little bars of like 6" x 2" x 1/4" as the maximum size (with some exceptions after ca. 1760 as Huntsman's crucible technology slowly crept in around the edges).  In central Asia, wootz pucks were uniformly small.  Enough steel for a sword blade, but in a hockey-puck-sized chunk you had to forge out. In Japan, if you were rated good enough to merit the use of tamahagane, you got fist-sized chunks of unconsolidated bloom steel to work with.  That's one of the many reasons a good sword was the wealth equivalent of a fancy car today.  If you showed up in one of the sword-making centers of medieval Europe with a cartload of modern leaf springs you'd be richer than you'd know what to do with.  Assuming you didn't get burned as a witch, of course. 

[Brian Dougherty]

It seems the old timers did what they did because it was efficient for their situation.  I'd love to know what caused them to forge that shape...

 

19 hours ago, Alan Longmire said:

If you showed up in one of the sword-making centers of medieval Europe with a cartload of modern leaf springs you'd be richer than you'd know what to do with.  Assuming you didn't get burned as a witch, of course. 

 

I have a few friends that are end of the world prepper types.  Sometimes they razz me for not buying into the need to stockpile food supplies they way they do.  I tell them, "I have an anvil, hammers and a lot of steel.  I'm pretty sure we'll make a deal at some point."

Edited February 5, 2025 by Brian Dougherty

[Alan Longmire]

41 minutes ago, Brian Dougherty said:

I'd love to know what caused them to forge that shape...

 

You mean the T-back, or the kilij?  T-backs act like the flange on an I-beam to provide stiffness.  The little choora I mentioned earlier had a paper-thin straight T-back blade about 1.5" wide at the hilt tapering to a point, and was rigid as a solid round bar.  That thing could probably pierce most armor of the area with little difficulty.

 

As for curved swords in general, Matt Easton has a couple of very informative videos:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X74wKh8B7z0

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq6og6I9gvQ&t=770s

 

[Brian Dougherty]

I was thinking the T back in this case.  There are other was to stiffen things up, but this one is certainly material efficient.  Material use is probably the driver in this case, but there is a romantic part of me that wants to believe some smith came up with a clever/easy way to forge the T and that is what lead to its general use. 

[Alex Jemetz]

Shape of the Ottoman/Kozak Kilij/Saber is forged, now working on refining the blade with my belt grinder and files.  I'm pleased with the shape having looked at many photos of historic sabers and recently acquiring a cool book on historic eastern sabers (WEAPONS OF WARRIORS: FAMOUS ANTIQUE SWORDS OF THE NEAR EAST).  I measured the length of the straight part of a kilij saber and the curve height from the horizontal plane and it came out to be eight inches.  Any advice or tips appreciated.

[Alex Jemetz]

File work on shaping the blade and getting out all the hammer marks, love to see the shape getting realized.  Will start on bevels once the width is 35 mm and then will also grind in the fuller with the intent to widen it with a scraper.

[Alan Longmire]

Speaking from experience, that's a ton of work!

[Alex Jemetz]

4 minutes ago, Alan Longmire said:

Speaking from experience, that's a ton of work!

Appreciate it Alan, I work at a desk all day so getting into the workshop with some music cranked and I am immersed in the work.  I get a lot of pleasure out of it and it takes me away from the day-to-day worries.

[Alan Longmire]

Oh, I know the feeling!  A well-clamped blade, a big file, and some good music equals meditative immersion that eats the hours fast.  

[Alex Jemetz]

Potential error averted!  Using the photo and the measurements that I have researched on the net for blade length and overall saber length to get the proportions correct on this project, I realized two days ago that I had made an error in converting the scale of the saber I was using as my guide...  I had the blade length as 33" where most Kilij sabers are 27" which led to the curve on my blade being too aggressive (from the horizontal plane of the blade it was 1.4" too steep).  A fellow blacksmith also pointed out that the curve was too steep and suggested I reheat and relax the curve.  Extremely nervous to try this for fear I would cause the blade to twist or distort, I did it and was ecstatic that it worked and the profile now is in line with historic examples.  Next steps are more file work for the bevels and marking out the complex fuller.    

[Alex Jemetz]

To change things up a bit and have a break from hand-filing the saber I got started on the wax mold for the cross-guard.  I'm determined to get better at the lost-wax process now that I learned what I did poorly the first few times (have to ensure I've completely burned out all the wax and heat the mold up to as close to molten brass temperature as possible and use more sprues and venting). 

 

[Alex Jemetz]

After a busy family oriented June and July, I finally got some time to spend in the workshop and work on the bevels of the kilij/kozak saber.  Using a rough file for my piece of mind (instead of my 2" x 42" belt grinder) to keep the bevels even and matched.  Also got started on the bevels for the yelman portion of the blade. 

[Doug Lester]

I is definantly coming along.  Keep up the good work.

 

Doug

[Alex Jemetz]

Thank you Doug!  Appreciate the motivation.  My daughter was in Poland this summer and visited Malbork castle, she sent pictures of sabers on display there so I have my kids feeding my passion...

[Eric Estlund]

Nice to have the family rooting for you!

[Alex Jemetz]

On 8/14/2025 at 6:38 PM, Doug Lester said:

I is definantly coming along.  Keep up the good work.

 

Doug

Thanks for following and commenting Doug.