Hanwei Rhinelander Renaissance Longsword Review

Let's review the Hanway Rhinelander. Hi folks, Matt Easton here, Scholar Gladiatoria. So I was sent the Hanway Rhinelander directly by Hanway actually to review quite some time ago now, so apologies that it's taken so long to get around to this review. So first up I have to, you know, confess this was sent to me as a free sample to review. That being said, I get sent a lot of free samples to review. If you think that that makes me biased in any way then just so that you know that's a full disclosure that this was indeed sent to me. I haven't paid for this with my own money. That being said, I think hopefully you know from looking at my previous reviews that I am pretty impartial. If something's great then I say so, if something's rubbish then I say so, but most of the things I review are a little bit of both and fall somewhere in the middle. And at the outset, first impressions of the Rhinelander are that pretty much it does fall somewhere in the middle. As would be expected of a sword in this price range, I'm not going to be comparing it, you know, like for like with much more expensive swords that might be over a thousand dollars or whatever. I've got to compare it with, you know, for what you're paying basically, put it into its correct placement in there. Now first impressions are it is a long sword, okay, it's what some people might prefer to call a bastard sword or a hand and a half sword. If I just dispense with the scabbard actually because that's probably the the least interesting element of this. Most people are buying the sword at the end of the day but this is a sharp, so this is a sharp blade so therefore having a scabbard with it is super useful for safety's sake. And this is intended primarily for solo training or test cutting or things like this, or just because you want to have a sharp sword. Now it is a bastard sword, it's not particularly big as you can see. If I compare it to a standard Federshwert for example it is a bit shorter, okay, and that is because this has a, let's have a little bit of a look, a 36 and a half inch blade so that's 90, about 90 centimeters. Okay so it's not a short sword but it's not a particularly big long sword either and correspondingly you'll notice again if we compare it with a standard Feder or Federshwert you'll notice that the hilt isn't particularly long either. Now some people are really big fans of this kind of size of bastard sword and something we have to say from the outset is that the long swords that lots of us are used to, particularly in HEMA, actually tend towards particularly the hilt length being a bit longer than is typical if we look at historical examples. So if you actually go into museums and private collections, if you actually look at the statistics on a lot of original 14th, 15th, 16th century hand and a half swords, a lot of them are a bit shorter than the blade and a bit shorter in the hilt than perhaps we're used to. Okay so this is a good sidearm and it's quite typical of the sort of size of swords that were worn and carried in period. Now in terms of what this is actually simulating, that's a little bit unclear. It's not a replica of a specific sword from a museum as far as I'm aware but the one thing which will leap out to lots of you watching this is that it has a side ring. Now side rings do arguably appear in the 15th century but really they don't really appear, they certainly don't become common, they don't become something we see in art or surviving in originals until we're into the 16th century. Possibly, debatably, in the 1490s you start to see them but really you're looking at the 1500s. So this is a 16th century hand and a half sword. Now you'll notice that the blade isn't necessarily a blade type which has to sit in the 16th century. This type of blade was actually around in the 13th century, 13th, 14th and 15th centuries and continued into the 16th century. In fact this type of blade with a fuller in the first half of the blade was actually less popular in the 15th century but made a comeback or seems to have got more popular again in the 16th century and there's some theories that perhaps that's because the armour levels perhaps in the 16th century started to decline again with the rise of gunpowder. Now I don't particularly hold with that theory because I think the levels of armour being worn in the first half of the 16th century were still pretty damn high so I'm not sure but for whatever reason these types of broader type of more cutting blade we start to see a resurgence of their popularity in the 16th century. So for me this is an early 16th century style of sword that I would place in about say 1510, 1520, something like that and it's the sort of sword that a man-at-arms would carry on the battlefield so someone wearing full plate armour. Occasionally you could find this type of sword being worn by someone like a halberdier or a pikeman or a crossbowman or a gunner something like this as well so this is a sort of sword that could be carried by anyone in the early 16th century and it is a hand and a half sword. It can be used in one hand incidentally it's not very nimble or wieldy in one hand but you can do if you were using a large pavis or riding a horse and you wanted to use this as a one-handed sword absolutely you could do but it's not a particularly nimble sword as a one-handed sword it's more suited towards two-handed use. Just to quantify that a little bit more I've just weighed this on my scales which are extremely accurate and it is 1465 grams, 1465 grams. So certainly for a one-handed sword that's pretty heavy, for a long sword it's not really light either actually so for its size bearing in mind this has got about a 35 and a half 36 inch blade this is actually a fairly weighty sword for its size in terms of the point of balance incidentally so it goes there let's get the tape measure out again in terms of the point of balance it is 13 centimeters or five inches so the point of balance is not particularly close to the hilt it's about average actually but if you look at the silhouette of this blade you'll notice it's still fairly broad up here in the cutting portion of the blade so when we talk about inertia rather than just mass and point of balance because those are only two things that actually don't tell us very much about how a sword feels in the hand aside from point of balance and length and mass we've also got to take into consideration the fact that some of that mass of that 1465 grams is actually out towards the tip and is quite far from your hand so that means that when you move this sword it has a lot of authority in the cut it's going to hit very very hard I expect it should be a very good cutter but it's not particularly nimble it's not particularly quick to move to different locations okay so it's not terribly slow but it's not a particularly quick and nimble sword it's more of a powerful chopper more of a powerful striker now in terms of where the sword wants to move around that is also kind of emphasized by the fact that if you hold it where you're going to hold it if it was a one-handed sword the point that stays still is around the center of percussion not the point so that gives the impression in the hand therefore that the feeling you have is that this is more of a cutting sword than necessarily a thrusting sword obviously it's got a sharp point and you can thrust with it but in terms of control and how the sword wants to move it's a sword that naturally feels like it wants to cut more than thrust so in many ways despite the fact that this is an early 16th century type of bastard sword it actually has a lot in common in terms of how it feels and its proportions and its size to actually 13th century so-called great swords of war the early long swords the first types of long swords that became popular in the 13th century particularly the second half of the 13th century so 1250 to 1300 that is actually quite a similar sword to that despite the fact that it's kind of wrapped up in a 16th century outfit shall we say now in terms of the flex it vibrates in the place where you want it to and doesn't rather where you want it to so it does stay relatively still around the center of percussion here which is what you want for good cutting dynamics it's all solid and sound you don't get any vibrations or anything like that when you do this in terms of where the blade flexes I'm doing this slightly gingerly because this is a sharp blade incidentally and I'm not wearing gloves of course it does flex more in the second half of the blade and that's due to the distal taper and that's something which I have to say Hanwei for the most part do get really really good there are other manufacturers of swords in this price range that have no distal taper at all or not enough distal taper on sword models where there should be and just to remind you guys I know regular viewers will know this not all swords have distal taper or should have distal taper but a lot of types of swords should have some distal taper to some degree and distal taper is not always linear either but in the case of this blade you can see along the blade that it has a good amount of taper and it does indeed flex in the second half of the blade where you want it to do so so far so good for the blade now let's have a look at the aesthetics of this sword in terms of the fit and finish quality from that point of view so first thing is looking along the edge it is straight along the edge there's no warps there's no kinks there's no twists there's no bends that is good okay and that's not true of all swords in this price range so in terms of the grind looking along the flats of the blade I can see some rippling in the fuller and a tiny tiny bit actually less along the flat bevels okay and that's the that's true of both sides the fuller is actually slightly more highly polished than the edge bevels in terms of the mid rib so where it transitions between a fuller blade and a mid ribbed or diamond flattened diamond section blade the mid rib is not particularly well defined although you can see it it's not it's not very well defined in terms of the top ridge but that being said it does appear to be straight perhaps with a little wobble on one side so the grinding's perhaps not as good as it could be in this flattened diamond section of the blade but in terms of the fuller the fuller is perfectly straight and where it ends up here it is well finished but there is an important note to mention here the fuller ends that high on that side and that high on that side so if I put my finger and thumb they do not end at the same height exactly there's about a centimeter or centimeter and a half height difference between the fuller on one side and the fuller on the other so that's something to be aware of really the fullers should end at the same height on both sides of the blade otherwise you can get uneven flex in the blade particularly in a thrust sometimes in the cut that can lead to a point of focus for stress in the blade. In terms of the edge grind it's very very good and again this is something that Hanwei have got a lot of experience of both in terms of their European swords and also in terms of their Asian swords Japanese, Chinese and other and it is a single bevel that comes straight down to the edge and it might have a micro bevel but I mean I can't see it so we've essentially got a single bevel edge and again in this price range that's something that a lot of makers don't do very well some of them it's a very very apple seeded edge kind of too fat edge which leads to very bad cutting performance in many cases it's a secondary bevel and again secondary bevels are historical on some types of sword but not really on medieval European or Renaissance swords. So in terms of the edge grind the edge doesn't actually start until here okay so the blade is basically blunt up until that point and then from there onwards it is ground down to a single bevel edge that seems really really good. In terms of sharpness I can run my fingers along both these edges this edge is very slightly sharper than the other one so it's a fine edge but I would say for really optimum cutting performance you will want to finish off that edge with a bit of something like a DC4 ceramic stone for example the falcon even stone that I like to use or your equivalent you could do it with sandpaper or whatever. So the edge in my mind is a very good very good edge geometry but the final sharpen of the edge is not quite 100% there it's kind of about 85 or 90 percent. So a good blade so far and I'm quite impressed by that let's have a little look at the hilts now. So Hanwei hilts in my experience all have a similar look to them the hilt components are cast and they're cast in a alloy steel okay so they're they're not brittle they're pretty tough but they don't have the look of mild steel or carbon steel and they don't rust as far as I've seen they're rust retardant they're essentially kind of like stainless steel I believe and that does give them a certain look they all look quite alike they've got a similar color and sheen to them as a result of that I think from an aesthetic point of view given that I deal with antiques a lot and originals they don't quite look like originals because they look like modern metal because they are they're a modern alloy they're not carbon steel like the blade here or even mild steel or iron they are a modern alloy steel and they do look like a modern alloy steel I'm not personally a huge fan of that I would prefer to see mild steel used because it looks more correct but that being said from a practical point of view they seem to be strong they seem to hold up and they don't rust so from a practical point of view there are some benefits there one of the disadvantages when you come along to design using a modern alloy steel though is for someone like me who's used to seeing original artifacts it means that when you have a pommel that is shaped a bit like a doorknob it looks like a doorknob so that's something to be aware for Hanway it would be part of my feedback to them would be like do something to the pommel to make it more distinctively pole like because at the moment if you use a modern alloy steel like stainless steel and you make it in the shape of a doorknob it's gonna look like a doorknob so I'm personally not really a fan despite the fact that it's very utilitarian and it works there's nothing functionally wrong with that pommel I find it unattractive okay in terms of the guard I actually quite like the guard I think it's well done I like the detailing that we've got here on the side rings that matches the finials of the quillons notice quillon not quillion a lot of people say quillion note where the i is placed in that word it's a quillon or quillon and if you're speaking French and so I actually quite like the guard but nevertheless there are some things to say about fit and finish now the other thing to mention as well before I go into the the way these components go together is the matter of the grips now Hanway grips all or most of them anyway have a similar look and they're made of a core of I believe plastic I don't believe it's wood I think it's a type of high impact plastic now with a thin patent leather or shiny leather glued over the top and this does have a tendency of scuffing quite easily because it's quite soft leather it's quite thin and also peeling off where it joins so it just glued on so the grips on Hanway swords are not the best in my opinion I prefer a wooden grip for traditional reasons although I understand using modern materials for durability and for a purely practical sword I do understand why that might be the case I don't I have to say as well I don't actually know what the core of this grip is made of because I haven't peeled off the leather but I suspect that it's man-made material rather than wood but in terms of compression and durability and things like that there might be some advantages indeed to doing that with the grip but they do all have a look to them and that look again much like the material that's used for the hilt fittings has quite a modern look and I can't say I'm really a huge fan of that to be honest I think that having a bit more texture to the leather having less of a shiny leather something that maybe was cord bound or had a cord texture to the leather would just increase you know with a relatively small input to the designer manufacturer of the sword it would have a many times bigger output in terms of what the quality of the sword looked like so for me personally the grips on Hanway swords make them look cheaper than really they could do with a little bit more effort now in terms of how these things fit together this for me is one of when you just first get the thing out of the box if you're used to higher end swords by other makes I won't mention here this is where the Hanway for me does fall down and you should be aware of now that doesn't mean it's a bad sword it doesn't mean that it will affect its function in any way it doesn't affect durability or things like this but absolutely I would want you to be aware and want you to take this away from this review as a major thing is that these components blade guard grip pommel are not put together in a particularly quality or skillful way I'm going to start with where the blade meets the guard now the first thing to notice is that if I get in close the first thing to notice is you'll notice there's a gap okay so where the shoulder of the blade sits down onto the guard with an actual medieval or renaissance guard this part of the shoulder of the blade should actually be recessed down into the top of the guard and sit in it now in fact if we look here we can see if I can get the camera to focus on the right thing we can actually see there is a groove for the blade to go into but in the case of this particular sword the blade doesn't quite go down into that recess it does on this side but it doesn't on that side now I suspect what's happened here is that one shoulder has the there's two possibilities one shoulder is slightly higher than the other the other possibility is the guard is not quite at 90 degrees on the tang it could be either of those but the result is that we've got I could get a piece of paper or perhaps a fingernail if I had longer fingernails underneath the blade on that shoulder and that's not very nice it also means potentially if this grip compresses during use at all we're going to end up with a loose guard and we've known if you if you look at my other reviews I've done of other swords that sometimes the guard can get loose during testing and I suspect that that might happen with this this particular hand way so that's the first thing okay the second thing is at the other end so we've now got we've got where the blade meets the guard then we've got the where the grip meets the guard I don't have actually any issues at all between the grip and the guard here but where I do have an issue is when we come to the pommel and there are two main issues at the pommel end firstly it's that where the let's try and get stabbing my ceiling there you can probably just about see there's a lip here where the grip meets the pommel and that's because the meeting is not completely symmetrical so I'm just trying to get this in the middle of the shot for you it's a little bit fiddly there we go so you can see there's a gap there which shows us that the top end of this pommel is actually hollow and you can actually get your fingernail down inside it there you can just about see there which is really really unattractive I've got to say and if you are using this sword on a regular basis it creates a hot spot potentially because with such a short grip you are going to be gripping the grip right down here you I mean okay technically you can just about squish your hands together and not grip that but most people are going to have their hands down so they've basically got two fingers over the grip and the rest of their fingers hopefully two more fingers over the pommel which means that this junction between the pommel and the grip is in the middle of your hand and having any kind of lip or kind of you know thing that sticks out is gonna potentially rub but most of all it just doesn't look very good the second thing about the pommel I mentioned there were two is the peening now one thing that is really really cool about this is this is a hundred percent a peened sword that is the end of the tang which is visible here has been riveted I like that I personally prefer peened tangs to screw nut tangs that being said the sword that I designed myself with with the company that we use for sparring has a screw has a nut at the end and it works perfectly well so I'm not completely against nuts or screw fittings but for a medieval sword I like peened fittings because they're more traditional and they have some mechanical advantages I think but we've got a peened end of the pommel up here but if I show you it there we go it's definitely peened you can see where that hammer has struck that pommel but unfortunately because the pommel is quite soft and possibly hollow it's done quite a lot of damage to the actual pommel and it's a really rough edged peen it's just not very well executed now funnily enough in some ways that can make the sword look more rustic and look more like a handmade medieval sword but it kind of doesn't work when it's juxtaposed by the stainless steel doorknob looking pommel you've got one thing that looks very modern and one thing which looks kind of rustic and it ends up just looking poorly finished actually that being said as I mentioned if I smack the pommel and wiggle the sword around and bang it against things I've got a workbench down here there's no vibrations in the hilt whatsoever and so it does despite the fact it looks a bit rough it has brought everything together tight and has therefore achieved the mechanical aim it's just to be aware that that does look quite rough I'm afraid and the fit between the pommel and the grip as we've seen not very good so all that remains is to cut a few things with this Rhinelander and give my feedback based on that just to reiterate really when I'm doing the cutting that will follow it's really going to be a testament partly to the edge sharpness and as we've seen the edge sharpness isn't fantastic although the edge geometry is good on this blade so the the main thing we're looking at here is not how well the sword cuts because I can make the sword cut better by sharpening it better okay the main thing I'm looking at here is how the sword handles how it tracks but also durability as well so I'm just back in from my cutting and bashing experiments with this sword so one thing to note of course with the Rhinelander is because it has a side ring and the side ring protects the outside of your hand you know you could spin it around and use the other edge but it's one of the hills is that generally speaking one edge is going to get used a lot more than the other so in this case I don't know if you'll be able to see on camera but you can see all of the kind of dirt and abuse is down what's essentially the front edge of this sword obviously if I'd done stuff with the back edge back edge cuts and stuff then we'd have more on the back edge but I don't in this case that obviously is not an exhaustive test I tested it on some water bottles of various kinds and then some relatively dry wood actually rather than the normal greenwood I can get hold of and then I just bashed it a bit on the logs now on the last thing I want to mention because you'll find out why in a second that's mildly abusive but not particularly abusive that actually bashing on a block of wood not particularly strongly was one of the standard Wilkinson sword tests that used to be done on all their swords before they sold them and in fact lots of sword makers today are doing a similar thing so it wasn't particularly abusive now the good news the blade stood up very very well as I mentioned beforehand a lot of how well it cuts through water bottles comes down to obviously my technique also how well it's sitting on the stand I don't know if you noticed but I was having a lot of problems getting the stand to be level and so my bottles were falling over prematurely so to speak apparently a lot of people suffer from that but so I wasn't getting a lot of cuts through bottles because the bottles were falling over very easily because the stand wasn't level so you've got to bear all those kind of random little factors in mind but fundamentally as I've mentioned in a video not that long ago one of the problems with cutting tests used in reviews is really for the most part how well the sword performs comes down to sharpness assuming it doesn't break and it stays together it doesn't bend that kind of stuff basically you're just measuring the sharpness now this blade I'm running my fingers along either side of it is not particularly sharp but that being said it does have good edge geometry and it's very close to being sharp a little bit of work by yourself you could make this super super sharp and the good news is this has good edge geometry it's still cut reasonably well even though it's not sharp to the touch and the blade stood up very very well there are absolutely no bends no you know rolling of the edge or chipping or anything like that which you definitely hope not to see on a good quality mass manufactured sword like this which is intended for use so the blade basically stood up pretty well and I actually think this is a pretty damn good blade but and here's the but one of the issues I find with Hanwei swords and I've been exposed to Hanwei swords for for almost a couple of decades now pretty much since they started making them is they are let down by their hilts particularly the grips but also the way that the hilt is assembled and put together and this is no exception and this did suffer a failure which may not have been apparent to you yet and it is not a major failure but it is nevertheless a minor failure and it's this okay you can hear you can hear this now has a wobbly guard and this unfortunately is a very common flaw that I have heard about with Hanwei swords they get a loose guard really quite quickly now that kind of undermines the argument using modern materials for the grip because if the modern material for the grip is not impeding compression enough to to prevent that guard from becoming loose in use and bearing in mind that was just one session okay that was just literally it was tight at the beginning it was loose after one session cutting a few bottles and cutting a little bit of wood and bashing a log maybe eight times and that was it we've got a loose guard already and now bear in mind also that a lot of these grips are glued on to the tang so just peening down that tang end more won't necessarily tighten that up and I suspect that it will never be possible to tighten that up without just basically pumping a load of epoxy into into the guard which may be what originally was keeping it in place so it comes back to that point if you remember earlier in the video where I showed how do you remember how the shoulder doesn't sit down into the guard essentially that junction between the guard and the blade is just not very good and then the compression between the grip and the guard is not very good theoretically a well-made medieval replica sword the guard should be hammered down onto the shoulders of the blade down the tang such that even without a even without a grip on that guard should be solid and rigid attached to the tang and blade so that shouldn't be able to happen if you constructed this properly it might be it might be that it's not possible to do that with this type of alloyed cast guard I don't know but anyway so really to sum up my view of this Hamway Rhinelander is that basically the blade is really quite good yeah there's some minor flaws the fact that the fuller doesn't end at the same place on each side of the blade the blade isn't particularly sharp but it does have a good distal taper it has good flex the heat treatment seems to be good the edge geometry the single bevel seems to be good so it's got all of the makings there of a good blade and fundamentally this is a good blade I think you could reuse this blade on another hilt without any shame I think it's worthy of that it is a decent enough blade comparable with lots of originals from the 16th century but with this sword I think the hilt lets it down the fit and finish particularly the pommel junction with the grip as we mentioned the rough nature of the peening at the end of the tang there and really this loose guard thing which seems to be really a typical problem for Hamways really needs to be remedied by having that guard essentially hammered down snugly fitting and gripping the junction between the blade and the tang a little bit better so I hope that's been a useful review for you I do think overall for the money this is still a decent sword but I think you should be aware of the flaws that I've mentioned there because not only are they flaws with this particular one but I'm aware of the fact that they are things which come up with other Hamways as well and I do think there's something can be remedied so in terms of feedback to Hanway I think looking at how that guard marries up against the blade absolutely critical looking at your grip construction and grip finish definitely worth doing and looking at the the final quality control of how things like the pommel meets the grip and whether there are any lips or hot spots there very very important to do as well I hope this has been useful see you again on the channel for another review or a video about history or warfare or weapons and thanks for watching I have been Matt Easton and I will continue to be see you soon thanks for watching we've got extra videos on Patreon please give our Facebook a like and subscribe if you haven't already cheers folks