Comment on Sword Design 2 by Merlkir

I was much less clever. I just thought: "well, neutral sword, which sword that I have seen, looks neutral?" And I thought of Felix's sword, because while it's supposed to be some kind of dragon(?) slayer sword, therefore it should be good, it always looked a bit mean to me. The metal is kind of dark, the bronze fittings are quite massive and brutal looking...
[link] - here for instance.

I liked the idea of putting red gems in there. Magical swords having some kind of red gems in the hilt are such a fantasy classic!
But I didn't want to just stick some huge gems in there, that's a bit silly and one of the reasons why fantasy swords often look goofy. So I looked at real swords and noticed a great (and difficult) way of insetting small pieces of gems in the metal.
Patrick Bárta - a brilliant swordmaker - wrote an article about making one of his swords and mentioned how difficult it was (with no experience, because nobody has done it before in the 20th century and documented the process) to put the stones in there and not crack them.
Here, some examples of that:
[link]
[link]

He also does that metal wire inlay thing, which is called "tausie" in czech and I don't know the term in english. :/
[link]

(images are quite huge, but the swords are beautiful and it's worth it. )