Here is a diagram with the name of each part of a rapier (I am not sure if these terms apply to any kind of sword, but most probably do, like "Pommel" and "Quillon").

Well, obviously a pirate would pick up stuff from different places, and of course it doesn't have to have the typical pirate sword, but I doubt a pirate would pick up a useless sword. Different swords have different purposes/uses, rapiers don't have slashing power, they were made pur puncturing the enemy, and you have to be trained to use that, what use would a pirate have for one? I would imagine a pirate would prefer a saber, or even a samurai sword, because then he can "swing it" at the enemies, and haven't you even seen a pirate grab on to a rope, then cut it somewhere below his hand and be pulled up to the other ship or something? hehe ;)
About the rapier being "fancier", look at the picture I attached. number 363.1 (it apears twice) is a saber and it's all fancy. Notice how it has a thick curved blade, that's for slashing throats ;).

also, the gold teeth sounds like a good idea. Obviously he should also have some missing.

Ok in the picture 1/ shows the quillions and 2/ shows the swept hand guards. On a Cup hilt rapier, has a bowl/cup shaped guard, the swept hand guards meet along the quillions somewhere, depending on design, and dont protrude thought on on top of the cup.

Right NightPhantoms put up some good ref pics there, beat me to it :P. To correct one small point, haha, the rapier was used for cutting as much as for stabbing. To be totally correct western swords relyed as much on weight and a good hard swing to cut wereas the easten swords were truely design and made to cut thought things as easily as possilbe.

Its amazing the things they teach you when you train to be a fencing coach. Never thought it would help with Maya modeling thou.

Thank you guys I am very grateful to you. It really helped.
He will have a rapier-hilted dagger(just shorten the blade, right?) +sabre +pistol. I will find something nice for the hilt.

PS. He is already missing a bunch of teeth, in fact al the top ones except those he is holding the dagger with

ur work is good i hope u will complete skeleton with in a short time and may i know r u intrested to animate ur skeleton model

if your wanting to make a rapier style parrying dagger, the guard will be surround the hand alot more, have bigger curvy quillions( to trap the blade ) and have a short thick blade. This might look a bit out of place on a pirate so I would suggest a more simple style.

For example looking at sabre no. 398 above. Shorton the blade and stretch out the grip and hand guard.

Only my views though.

http://therionarms.com/reenact/mon_dagger.html - reference for quillons

well, added and subtracted teeth, dagger

sabre now looks like a sabre :))

Thx to all, this challenge gave me very much, I learned a lot, it was a pleasure.

that's pretty cool, try and find some time to rig it though, it would be awesome posed, and I would imagine it would be easy to rig since there's an object for each bone, right? But I don't know... Still cool though :tup:

I will rig it eventually, but not now. Today is the last day I was able to work on it.

Very cool, I love the final posted render.
Well done,

Mark :)