quote:
The problem is my background. Not something I do now, I have some education and experience in general manufacturing, with maybe a little Aerospace tossed into the mix. So I can fairly easily visualize what it took to make them, and have some idea of relative costs. And from my perspective: After (re) fitting them if they wanted to use recycled crossguards. I think that they would have made at least an attempt to remove the Gau marks as a part of a recycling process (not unlike what they did with regrinding the blades), and then nickel plated them. Or at least just nickel plated them to match. End of discussion.

In physical terms it would have meant hanging them on some hooks and dipping them in a plating tank. Which had to be done anyway with the rest of the nickel plated components, and would have cost almost nothing extra as most of the intermediate steps for iron/steel were not needed.


Again Fred. They didn't need to be refit. I've tried very hard to explain that. Tell me exactly what you think had to be refit? Crossguards were not fit, grips were made to mate them. Now you've moved to talking about the scabbard throat piece radius matching. Again Crossguards were not fit to throats, throat radii were made to match the guard.
What's with the plating? NS guards were not plated. If anything a quick rub makes these bright again, especialy after just a couple years. The patina we see is 75 yr patina.
Again you are bringing up iron based crossguards. I still fail to see how and or why that comes into this discussion. They are rare and 95% of later crossguards are zinc based. IMHO 99% of makers went from NS directly to zinc.

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