What Every Fencing Parent Should Know About … Caring for Weapons and Equipment

So – wow. We’ve finally finished the NAC series of articles! And it only took ten – ten! – articles to do so. It looks like you are going to be stuck with me for a lot longer. So if you’ve been putting it off, time to start that GoFundMe drive to raise money to bribe USA Fencing to get rid of me before I start a new, maybe-even-longer series. Anyone up for a twenty-article magnum opus on how to choose the best screwdriver for weapons repair?

But before my inevitable GoFundMe-enabled retirement, one last NAC point: why are fencing parents stuck with credit card bills that approach the GDP of Lichtenstein while not themselves getting to compete in the NACs? Entirely unfair! Shouldn’t we have a NAC event JUST FOR FENCING PARENTS? Of course we should! So here are a few modest proposals for the Parental NACs (trademark pending), which I imagine should be in the form of a decathlon covering the following events:

• The Wallet Lunge (sponsored by MasterCard): After a ref says “engage,” parents compete to see who can pull out their wallets fastest and hand over a credit card to pay tournament fees. Ties are settled using saber right-of-way rules.
• The AskFRED Registration Thrust: Parents compete to see who can be fastest to secure a spot at a local tournament before it’s fully booked. Ties are settled by seeing which parent can most quickly calculate the letter rating schedule for the tournament.
• The NAC Puddle Vault: Parents are given two minutes to make their way from the Q fencing pod to a fencing bag located across the venue to retrieve a forgotten body cord. Along the way they are required to navigate an obstacle course consisting of spilled coffee, empty water bottles, Gatorade puddles, and open fencing bags. There are mandatory deductions for competitors who stop to chat with other fencing parents along the way.
• The Lost Sock Search: A single missing fencing sock is hidden somewhere within a hotel room, a fencing bag, and a path between the hotel and the venue. Parents are given two minutes to return with the missing sock.
• The Unpack-and-Repack Medley: Parents are given a tangled mass of gear, body cords, swords, and random charging cords. The winner is the parent who can get everything packed before the child realizes the fencing bag doesn’t contain a lucky fencing sword.
• The Boutique Vendor Sprint: Parents line up 120 seconds before a bout to dash to a vendor’s table to buy an emergency glove, body cord, or other forgotten equipment. Points are awarded for grabbing the correct brand, snagging a deal, or having the credit card actually go through on the first try on those weird, white square boxes used by NAC vendors.
• The Budgetary Parry: Parents stand at the end of the strip and are approached by young fencers in quick succession asking for new fencing equipment. The winning parent is the one who successfully parries the greatest number of requests for new equipment.
• The GroupHousing Booking Flèche: Fencing parents line up on a set of computers with equal-speed internet access. At the signal of a ref, housing is released for a year’s worth of tournaments all at once. The winner is calculated by summing the total distance between the booked hotels and the venue. Negative “fool’s gold points” are awarded for the booking of hotels that seem to be close but in fact are located at the wrong end of the convention center.
• The Referee Death-Glare Stare-Down: Fencing parents are lined up to watch their children fence 14-14 bouts. As their child loses, parents are graded on the death stares aimed at the referee, using the categories of style, intensity, and length.
• The Lamé Lift: Parents are graded on the speed with which they can lift a smelly, sweat-soaked lamé and carry it across the venue to deposit it in a fencing bag. There are mandatory deductions for retching, holding the nose, or dropping the lamé in disgust short of the fencing bag.

Any tie would be broken by a winner-takes-all event called the Parking Lot Snipe: Parents start from their houses to make a mad dash to a school pickup line, a random fast food restaurant drive through, and then to a local fencing club to see who can grab the limited number of parking spots. Points are awarded based on total time to destination, the nutritional value of the meal, and the speed at which the fencing bag makes it into the club.

So what are you waiting for? Time to start practicing! With my immense influence in the fencing world, you might as well pencil it into your schedule: the next Parental NAC is just around the corner. Of course it will be in Salt Lake City.

But in the meantime, it’s time for a new set of articles, this time on weapons and weapons repair. Weapons repair is the never-ending task designed to teach you why your high school English teacher forced you to read Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus,” which lauded the Greek mythology character who was sentenced to the eternal punishment of rolling a boulder to the top of a mountain, only to have it always roll back down right before he reaches the top. The fact that Sisyphus embraces the futility of his task makes him an existentialist “absurd hero,” according to Camus, which I could explain if I hadn’t fallen asleep in class.

And that’s you – the absurd fencing parent hero who can never quite be caught up on weapons repair. Because just as soon as you are, the lesser-known characters of Greek mythology – the Sadistic Fencing Gods (SFGs), who are always cranky because Zeus and Hera force them to sit at the kid’s table when they visit Mount Olympus on Thanksgiving – are waiting to pounce, snapping blades, popping out blade wires, and making perfectly good swords become intermittent nightmares. Because the SFGs HATED high school English, which is the root cause why they went down the dark, dark path of dedicating their existence to tormenting fencers and fencing parents everywhere.

Fortunately, it turns out that, despite the best efforts of the SFGs, many weapon repairs are not that hard. In general, here are a few rules of thumb for fencing parent weapons repair:

• Rule of Thumb #1: A lot of basic repairs and general weapons upkeep consist of cleaning and tightening. You know how to clean! And tightening is just another word for rotating something! You’ve got this.
• Rule of Thumb #2: Repairing as things break rather than waiting until the need becomes critical is the key … well, to life, but also to weapon repair.
• Rule of Thumb #3: If it is at the tip, you generally can repair it.
• Rule of Thumb #4: You can always repair body cords.
• Rule of Thumb #5: If your child fences sabre, you get to laugh at foil and epee fencing parents, whose repairs involve wiring.

So the next set of articles will focus on weapons repair, including pulling together the best videos I have found on the types of weapons repairs that are within the reach of most fencing parents, if they are type of parents who are within reach of some pretty common tools. If you have shied away from doing these types of repairs, consider the following things that even the most tool-challenged parents can fix:

• The sword needs new tip screws. Okay, if this is a task you find overwhelming, I suggest you skip straight to the “Fun Fact of Interest Only To Me” ending to the article. This involves three steps: (1) periodically pulling a magnet over the screwdriver to magnetize it to hold the screw in place; (2) dropping and losing at least one tip screw, as your tribute to the SFGs; and (3) ensuring that you don’t cross-thread the screw. Always a good idea not only to check that every sword has two tip screws before a tournament but to do a quick tighten to get the ones that are not fully tightened. Because you don’t want to be the parent that everyone says has a screw loose.
• The bell guard or grip are loose. A quick tighten of the nut on the bottom is about an easy a fix as you will ever see, assuming you are not the person who gave up after the bullet point about tip screws. Just be certain that you are keeping the grip in the position preferred by the fencer, which generally involves holding it all the way to the clockwise position if it was loose before tightening.
• The sword is “clicky.” If you test the tip and it feels like it is binding a bit, then often the answer is as simple as cleaning it. This involves removing the tip screws that hold the tip in place, adding a few drops of 90% alcohol to a cotton swab, using a real Q-Tip for epee and the cheap generic ones for foil. (I’m sure there’s a joke in there that I’m missing.) The 90% alcohol is used because you don’t want water to remain behind that could potentially cause a bit of rust. Then use the aforementioned rotational skills to clean the barrel. If the tip looks dirty, you also can carefully clean the tip with the cotton swab. Follow up using a small square of 400-grit sand paper – some armorists recommend 800-grit, but I find it doesn’t work as well. Best of all, this step involves the double-rotational skills of first rolling the sandpaper into a little tube and then rotating the sandpaper cylinder within the barrel. Wow, who knew rotating things could be so much fun?
• The sword fails the thin shim test. I was going to start with some kind of joke that began “spring is here,” but I couldn’t find the punch line. (Not that this has ever stopped me before.) At any rate, shortening the contact spring is an easy fix, just try rotating (tightening) it a quarter turn clockwise and retest. Be sure to push in a way that the contact spring is compressed as it turns, to minimize chances of it bending. If the sword still fails after the rotation, repeat until you get it to the right length. There’s no need to actually reinstall it with tip screws to test it each time, just plop it in and test with the thin shim until it works.
• The sword fails the weight test. Generally, this is a simple matter of swapping in a new and stronger pressure spring. By contrast, when the scale says that I failed the weight test, then the fix is a lot harder.
• The sword needs a new tip. A surprisingly versatile fix when your current tip has seen as much wear as that Ford Pinto with the faded Carter/Mondale bumper sticker you saw last week on the highway. Note that you may need to adjust the contact spring as some tips ship with the contact spring being too long for any barrel. This is because while it is easy to tighten the spring, the reverse is not true: if you try to lengthen the spring by loosening it, you generally will bend the spring and will need to replace it. In fact, some armorists advise that if you need to lengthen a contact spring (because it won’t go off even if fully depressed) then you should just take the contact spring off and install a new one, so you can tighten it to the appropriate length.
• The blade wire is popping out. If the area of lost glue contact is relatively small, fixing the sword in a bent position and applying a bit of super glue will usually fix it. Plus this is the one repair that offers the best chances of being able to post a funny picture on Instagram, including the possibilities of accidentally gluing your fingers to the blade or letting the glue run into the tip and glueing it open if you don’t keep the sword upright. If for some reason you are allergic to funny Instagram pictures, one trick is to put a plastic baggie over your finger when pushing the loose wire into the super glue, as the super glue won’t stick to the plastic. And always keep the sword tip up when gluing anywhere near the end of the sword.
• The body cord is intermittent or doesn’t work at all. Body cord repairs nearly always involve the same thing: repeated stress near the connector has broken the connection, requiring removal of the end, cutting back the wires, reconnecting them to the metal prongs, and putting it back together. A good fix for when you are hankering to watch a re-run of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Dr. Who, especially if the good Doctor loans you a sonic screwdriver to help with the repair. I have yet to discover a weapons-repair use for Buffy’s stake, but if a vampire comes to steal your body cords, then it could come in handy.
• The sword is intermittent (maybe). A surprisingly common fix is to clean the tip, which works if there is a small bit of corrosion or debris that is intermittently blocking the contact spring from completing the circuit. If this doesn’t work, then the sword generally will require more sophisticated repair, unless you happened to keep the sonic screwdriver, which is as useful for fixing intermittent swords as it is for fighting off Daleks.

Then, for the sake of completeness, I will also draw together a few things that only tool-loving parents can fix:

• The sword is intermittent after cleaning or a new tip. The sword likely has wiring issues, so take it in to an armorer (or to Dr. Who).
• Replacing the bell guard. Theoretically, this is an easy fix – just remove the pommel nut, take everything off, swap in a new bell guard, and put everything back in reverse order. The reason why I put this in the harder category is that it is very easy to have the thin wires fall out of the tiny little notch in the bell guard, which often means that they will either have the insulation get nicked or will be severed entirely when the bell pommel nut is tightened. Since it is a quick fix (for someone who does it quite often), I just keep the sword on stand bye until the next NAC, where I hand it over to a NAC armorist who fixes it in about two minutes.
• The wires inside the bell guard have broken. If the break is close to the end, you may be able to cut the wire, strip it, and reattach it to the socket. If the remaining wire is too short, you require a rewire.
• The sword needs rewiring. I do not recommend this except for the most hard-core fencers or fencing parents. If you laugh at me for wimping out on this one, I will send vampires to your house to steal your body cords.
• The sword goes off when shaken. Generally requires a rewire.
• The sword needs a new blade. During the pandemic, I did this several times and it worked out, as I just copied the sword as it previously existed (cutting the tang to the same length and bending it to the identical angle, and then reassembling everything). But the biggest problem is putting the sword back together, as noted above, because it is easy to have the wires fall out of the little channel and be damaged during reassembly. And then you will come to the realization that now you have a blade that needs to be rewired, all while listening to the SFGs laughing at you in the background.

So the articles will work through both the easy and the harder repairs. By the end, there should be a comprehensive set of repairs that fencing parents can do or at least benefit from understanding. There are some good videos of equipment maintenance and weapons repairs online, which I am planning to review, sort, and categorize. And unlike Sisyphus, I will be able to finish my task within the next two weeks. Sorry, SFGs.

Fun Fact of Interest Only To Me. Fencers wear white uniforms because, before the advent of electronic scoring, touches were recorded on the usually white surface with a wad of ink-soaked cotton on the tips of the weapons. In other words, fencers competed using really big, ink-soaked Q-Tips.

Q-Tip of the Day: Questing to raise some querulous questions, queries, and quibbles? Just want to tell me that the best use for my articles would be to print them out and wad them up into ink-soaked paper balls to be placed on the ends of swords or in nearby trash cans? Test out whether I actually answer my emails by contacting me at usfafencingblog@gmail.com.

Did you know that “USFA Parents’ Fencing Blog” is just an anagram for “gasbag fencer lifts no pun?” Now that you know, check out prior punny gasbag fencing dad articles on the USFA Parents’ Fencing Blog Website. For membership or tournament questions, or just to let USA Fending leadership that you would really, really like to see Q-Tip Fencing at a future NAC, visit the USA Fencing Contact Us Page.