[urbanspaceman]

Much of the enduring tale of the German swordmakers of Shotley Bridge was based on myth, fallacy and deliberate obfuscation; this encouraged some chroniclers to either abandon or simply replicate the task… understandably. This is why it has taken five years of concentrated research to establish a clear, focused and legitimate narrative.
However, at the heart of the tale always lay the 'secret machine' that supposedly gave the Germans a distinct advantage in the manufacture of hollow blades for smallswords, and was cited as the reason for granting a royal charter to the syndicate financiers. Truth be told, we have to question where their competition lay: Solingen imports were tariffed and heavily taxed in the late 1600s.
Much conjecture and controversy attended the existence and design of this machine, which actually persisted all throughout my research period.
As I stated in an earlier posting, it was never possible to design a machine that could fabricate the decreasing radius hollows mechanically in a single pass, and it still isn't; although I suspect I might have come very close.
What I discovered, was that there were two machines, with the second model designed by Huguenots in Solingen on or before 1630. This was the rolling machine I described in that earlier post that was used to produce colichemarde blades and lower priced battlefield-ready smallswords: some with sharpened edges. It was eventually railroaded out of Germany in 1687 in a typical Luddite exercise, as they were not short of manual labour: again thanks to the invasion of Huguenots.
In a previous posting I referred to the scarcity of colichemardes in comparison to regular hollow-blade smallswords; I propose a similar reason as many experts, in that the colichemarde is actually neither use nor ornament, and any sensible officer contemplating battlefield sword-fighting would have nothing to do with them. Maybe off-duty officers, forever on their guard, might have taken them up… but not many.
Was this machine in use in Solingen? I suspect not. Did colichemarde blades ever come out of Solingen? If they did, they would not feature a groove rather than the hollow - at least - not after 1687 anyway: hence my interest in finding such a blade.
This is one of those issues I put on the back burner as it was not critical to my research; but now my book is finished and TV production is at a virtual standstill, I can indulge.
NB I believe the business of an efficacious thrust rather than a debateable cut was first highlighted during the Peninsular War by British medics commenting on the survival rate of the French, but this is not an area I have explored as it is purely peripheral to my principle narrative and not on my list of indulgences: feel free to disabuse.