Kaskara with welded hilt

[blue lander]

Pictures attached. It seems like somebody welded a bar of aluminum to a kaskara to make a hilt. Has anybody seen this method used before? What I'm wondering is if it was done by an indigenous person or was it a later repair done by a western owner. The blade looks pretty nice with deep fullers straight fullers, hopefully European, with man in the moon markings.

I didn't pay much for it, pretty much the lowest price I've ever seen a Kaskara go for, so even if its an "inauthentic" hilt repair or the blade isn't European I'm still pretty pleased with it. It hasn't arrived yet, I'll give it a closer inspection when it does.

[spiral]

Blades African.

Hilt Looks cast on, not welded.

Zinc is a good low temperature favourite for casting in many primitive regions. {looks like aluminium but heavier.}

spiral

[blue lander]

I stand corrected on the blade. Does it at least look like an older blade?

I hadn't considered zinc. The hilt doesn't bother me much except how it flows over the top of the cross guard. If they had kept it neater it'd look cool.

[Edster]

The maker's mark sort of looks like that of a sword smith named Awad Adam who worked in Kassala in 1986 and could have made swords since the early 1960s. His mark was the Arabic number 40 (Arbane) and the sketch I made of his mark looks a lot like the mark on your blade, close, but not identical. Wish I had focused on more details at the time.

Dating Kassala swords can be difficult since each smith has his own style and may even change over his career. For example, your sword has three narrow fullers and the center one runs almost full length. I have a sword also with three narrow fullers, but the center one is only about 3 inches longer than the other two. This sword was attributed as a "Mahdi sword" by other smiths. However, other 1980's swords also have similar fuller arrangements. Also I have another with three wide fullers. One goes almost to the blade tip. It was made by Hussain Mohammad, a smith active in 1986. His mark has two straight lines with a protuberance in the middle that looks like a nose since it is backed by a round punch like an eye.

Also, different smiths used the same punches in different configurations to identify their work. Not all strikes were consistent so the two swords made by the same smith would look a little different to the untrained eye.

So who can tell what is really diagnostic of age?

Hope I haven't muddied the waters too much.

Ed

[blue lander]

It looks like the middle fuller goes all the way to the very tip. The seller just shipped it out today, so hopefully it'll arrive early next week and I can take a better picture.

[blue lander]

The kaskara arrived yesterday. The blade is about as long as my other kaskara but the hilt is much smaller. It barely fits my hand. It looks like the pommel was peened on, which suprised me as I expected it to be made of a single piece of metal. The tips of the crossguard are diamond shaped, much more nicely formed than on my other one. It's a little heavier and thicker than my other kaskara and a little bit less flexible. The edge starts where the short fullers end and isn't very sharp. Overall it's a very sturdy piece of metal.

The scabbard is weird. It's limp as if there's no supporting structure inside. I peeled back the leather a little bit to peek inside, no sign of wood or cardboard or anything like that. The inner layer appears to be some sort of harder leather that may have once given it rigidity. It almost felt like plastic or some sort of lizard skin.

I also just noticed the blade is actually longer than the scabbard by well over an inch.