Keith, do you mean 600 and 650g for your two smallswords? If that is the case, they are very much on the heavy side, especially with those short blades (might have lost a little from the tip over time?).
Are there any markings on the blade to suggest a military use? That might be one reason for the extra weight.
Personally I’m not a big fan of the ‘re-purposed rapier blade’ theory. I’m sure it happened, but logically it should have been rare. The effort needed to re-profile a 40 inch blade into a 30-32 inch one and get the distal taper and balance correct would have been considerable. Furthermore, who would do the work? A cutler? Their speciality would have been mounting blades on hilts, so the blade would have needed to have been supplied re-profiled. This does lend to the ‘family blade’ possibility, which we know happened, but it just increases its scarcity in my view.
We know from surviving examples that a whole plethora of blade profiles were used throughout the history of the smallsword and into the courtsword period. But this is to be expected, the majority of these swords were individual purchase custom pieces. Even ones that follow a pattern, very, very often have custom blades. It is the nature of the smallsword, and while there are facts we can determine, such as the need for specialised equipment to economically produce tri-foil blades, that can’t be used to fix a lenticular blade to any specific era or location. Just because Solingen had the tools to make tri-foil blades, didn’t mean that they stopped making lenticular ones. Of that French customers stopped buying them.
Looking at the fencing styles of the period is very useful, and what stands out from the confirmed Iberian smallswords is that they often have functional annuletts, long after they became decorational in the French styles. This allowed the user to pass their finger over the cross-guard ‘ala-rapier’. Additionally, because the Iberian / Southern Italian fencing styles retained some of the rapier cuts, the longer ‘rapier style’ blades were retained.
My main issue I have with the “re-purposed rapier” or “transitional rapier” names is that they are all to oftern miss-used by sellers to upsell what is a perfectly normal and honest smallsword. It’s like the black grip Lugers were sold as SS “black widow” Lugers when all the evidence points to it being a simple production change. And yet the myth persists.
And while Keith’s blade may be a re-purposed rapier, there are other simpler reasons for the placement of the mark or ricasso modification, that are also possible. Maybe the cutler needed to re-profile the ricasso to get the balance correct on the hilt. Or the tang broke, or it was miss-struck by a drunk worker maker didn’t care enough.
Keith, if you’re looking to increase your sample size of smallsword dimensions, I keep the details of my eight smallswords here:
Sword Measurements (the 8th sword is listed under French swords, as m1767 infantry officers sword)