This piece is a direct replica of a historical rapier in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated to circa 1540. Also, it’s very shiny.

Kudos to the Met Museum for making available so many different angles of the historical rapier, including directly facing each side, which made it considerably easier to construct a replica.

For the boffer replica, I used closed-cell foam for all the swirly pieces around the handle (crossguard, counterguard, etc.), coated with chrome duct tape. It’s actually quite tricky to get the duct tape to smoothly and precisely surround such twisty shapes without unsightly creases/bulges/valleys, and involves laying the tape around the outside of a curve, then making cuts on both sides so that each segment can fold and overlap. This is a fairly time-consuming process at first, but with each piece I complete, I get swifter, which is quite satisfying.

As with the first rapier, the handle and ricasso are wrapped with faux leather, the core is an 8mm-diameter carbon fiber tube, and the blade is done in a composite foam style with open-cell foam surrounded by a thin layer of closed-cell foam, to achieve such a long, lightweight, and safe blade.

Here’s a shorter sample of blade that I made just so you can see the cross-section. It looks like a cross between a sushi roll and a baby seal, and it works quite well.