REWIRING EPEE BLADES

One further advantage of enamel-covered wire is that
there is no need to over-engineer the connection between the
wires and the bodywire socket - as Leon Paul epees appear
to suffer from now. All that is necessary is to tin a small
length of the enamel-covered wire, and to use this as a con-
nection. The tinned section is screwed to the socket, and
there you have it: no need for fancy connection pieces,
which merely add cost.
One source of hollow epee studs and enamel-covered wire
still remains, but I am keeping that a secret, so you will have
to do your own detective work if you want to find it.
Back to the actual task of re-wiring an epee blade. This is
very straightforward. Just disassemble the blade and point.
When you are unscrewing the barrel from the blade put the
epee point into the barrel to prevent it from distorting under
the pressure of the mole wrench or vice, remove the old plug
assembly and replace this with your new wire set.
As with a foil blade, re-screw the barrel onto the blade
(again, remember to put the point into the barrel). Be careful,
• here, to make sure that the wires rotate freely as the barrel is
being screwed back on. Once the barrel is firmly screwed onto
the blade, run the wires down the bottom of the blade groove,
side-by-side and parallel to each other along the entire length
of the blade. Put a slight concave bend in the blade and, main-
taining this, wrap the wire end round the threaded tang of the
blade and secure this with sticky tape.
Be careful not to put too much bend into the blade. You only
want a slight tension to make sure the wires lie in the bottom of
the groove during the gluing-up process. If you use too much
tension, you will pull the wire ends out of the plug in the barrel.
If you have any doubt as to whether you can exercise the
necessary control here, then it is best to use a two-stage glu-
ing-up process. First, mix up a small amount of epoxy glue
and use this to glue the wire at the barrel end, perhaps extend
this down the blade a centimetre or two - no more! Use a
match and some tape to hold the wire in place while the glue
is curing (this will only take about I hour at most). When the
glue has cured, you can tension the wire into the bottom of
the blade groove, as described, secure in the knowledge that
your initial gluing will prevent the wire from being pulled
back out of tne plug.
Whichever method you use, once the wire is securely in
place and taped down, run a generous dollop of glue down
the blade, starting at the barrel end and ensuring that all sec-
tions of the wire nave been well coated. Keep a short section
of the blade groove free of glue immediately where the guard
fits onto it. This will allow you to run the plastic insulation
sleeves between the inside guard and the bodywire socket
slightly proud of the guard, and extending slightly into the
blade groove, when you re-assemble your weapon.
Then set the blade to cure. After about I hour, take up the
blade and bend it into a concave shape with the wire groove
on the inside bend. If you have missed out any pieces of the
wire and it comes away from the groove, this will instantly
show up. Just mark any such section carefully,, mix up some
more glue, and stick down the wire again. Once the gluing is
successfully completed, leave the blade to cure fully for 24
hours, preferably in some warm corner of the house.
Using a razor blade or Stanley knife, remove the surplus
glue from the outside surfaces of the blade, and from the top
of the V-groove. Be careful not to remove any glue from inside
the groove as you may inadvertently detach a bit of the wire
at the same time. All that remains to do is cut the wire to pro-
duce two ends, bare these for connection to the bodywire
socket, and replace the plastic insulation sleeves on each wire.
You can now reassemble your epee for use.
Be aware that re-wiring an epee may alter the distance of
the travel of the point, so test this with a feeler gauge.
Meyrick Simmonds
In the last issue of The Sword, I presented a method of re-
wiring foil blades, using enamel-covered copper wire. In this
article, I will describe how to re-wire epee blades.
The good news is that, in general, epee blades are much eas-
ier to re-wire than foil blades. The actual wire groove on an
epee blade is much more open than that on a foil and so it is
much easier to remove the old wire and clean the blade of all
traces of the old glue.
The bad news is that it is now difficult to find enamel-cov-
ered copper wire, instead of the usual cotton-covered wire. To
understand why, you must first look at the design of current
epee point assemblies.
An epee point is a simple switch that consists of two wires
running up the blade to the point, through the base of the bar-
rel and into a solid plastic 'plug'; two brass studs are embed-
ded into this, and the tops of these are exposed within the
barrel. The spring holds the point away from the studs or con-
tacts. When a hit is made with sufficient force to contract the
spring, the small travel spring in the base of the point makes
contact with both of the studs simultaneously, thus complet-
ing an electrical circuit and causing the recording box to reg-
ister the hit.
Until a few years ago, epee wire manufacturers - notably
Leon Paul - used hollow studs as the brass contact points
within the barrel and the wires were soldered into these.
When an epee needed re-wiring, it was a simple matter to
remove the hollow studs from their plastic plug; they could
then be heated with a soldering iron, and the stump of the old
wire removed by pinching it between the soldering iron and
a screwdriver - in the same manner as replacing the wire in a
brass foil stud, described in my last article.
Now things are quite different. Leon Paul, together with
almost all other fencing equipment manufacturers, have
changed over to using solid brass studs and cotton-covered
wire. To make a connection to the wire, the wire ends are sim-
ply squeezed alongside the studs when these are inserted (by
machine?) into the plastic plug.
If you remove the stud from its plug in order to replace an
old wire, it is virtually impossible to re-pinch the wire with
the stud in such a way that you get a clean and secure contact.
The only alternative is to try and solder a new wire onto the
stud. But this is fiendishly difficult to do without creating too
wide a diameter for the stud/wire connection to pass back
through the drilled hole in the plug.
The point is that, as things now stand, the only way you can
re-wire an epee blade is by buying a new epee wire assembly
from Leon Paul or other suppliers - at £2.50 a go. My method
of re-wiring costs mere pence!
In a famous incident in the 1976 Olympic Games, the Russian
pentathlete Boris Onishenko was found to be cheating by secret-
ly soldering wires to each of the epee blade wires and running
these up into his weapon's handle; here, the wire ends were
bared. So every time he squeezed his sword hand, Onishenko
could short circuit his epee point and register a hit at will.
To prevent this happening again, the FIE has stipulated that
both wires on an epee must be individually double insulated
with a plastic sleeving, from the guard right up to where they
are screwed into the epee's bodywire socket. So to comply
with this ruling, they require thick plastic insulation sleeving.
The groove on an epee blade where the wire passes through
the guard is simply not big enough to accommodate both of
the plastic sleeves in such a way that these bed down into it.
Tne result is that, all too often, the cloth-covered wire is not
armoured by the second plastic layer of insulation sleeving at
the point where it goes through the guard. Cloth-covered
wire is very vulnerable to chafing, and friction between the
blade and the guard eventually rubs away the cloth insula-
tion and bares-the wire. This is a primary cause of those irri-
tating intermittent faults that plague epeeists.