Opinions on reproduction turkish (or persian?) dagger

[Richard G]

Originally Posted by Ian

dakary,

Your pictures show that your hand is larger than the grip can presently accommodate for safe use, especially using the "ice pick" grip. The issue is slipping of the hand downwards on to the blade during use. Placing the thumb over the end of the hilt can help a bit but would probably be uncomfortable with the present geometry of the hilt.

If you place pictures of your knife next to some of the antique examples shown here, I think you will see that the cut out area is considerably longer on the antique examples, and the profile is flatter in the cut out areas. The small shoulder so produced provides some stoppage for the hand during use. The maximum depth of the cut out area presently on your knife looks okay, so it would be a matter of making the cut out area longer and flatter. Perhaps the maker of this knife would make those changes for you. After all, it's a custom order!

If you don't plan to use the knife then I would not make any changes to the hilt. The style is approximately correct. As far as the scabbard is concerned, if you wanted to make all the changes you mention it may be easier to simply commission a new scabbard to your revised specifications. Of course, that may be expensive. How much more do you want to spend on this project? A jeweler could likely remove the rings relatively cheaply. After that, things may get more pricey.

Well! That's to the point!
(no pun intended)

Best wishes
Richard

[Ian]

Originally Posted by Richard G

Well! That's to the point!
(no pun intended)

Best wishes
Richard

[dakary]

Just wanted to give a little update on this. I also reached out to the guys at Bayt Al-Asad, which is a cool channel for middle eastern arms and armour on youtube (they haven't been around for a long time but there is cool stuff on there), and they echoed some of the comments here. I'm going to at least try to do a little bit of a re-profile of the hilt. We'll see about the rest. I'll post pictures if anybody is interested. Thanks again!