October 21st, 2007 | by admin |
Sunday evening, a perfect time to “exit” the week with some good and exciting news. A couple op posts ago, we mentioned that we found a young smith in China who made some very good high carbon steel and folded steel katana.
After a long time of discussion and tweaking we finally got the first samples here in our shop. As we expected, it’s (almost) exactly what we did have in mind…A very nice looking quality sword which can be offered at a very low price.
We didn’t had the time to give this sword to some practitioners and see what they think about it but as far as we can tell, it’s a very well balanced sword with a very good cutting ability.The samples did come with a groove so we didn’t do the very heavy cutting stuff yet but as you can see on the 2 pictures posted below, the blade has no problems at all with some strong pine branches. The blade does have scratches but no damage on the edge !
More cutting exercises will be done in the upcoming week so stay tuned !
At this moment, we don’t offer any of the samples for sale but we do expect the first delivery to be here somewhere in December.
If you’re interested in these swords, we might have a good offer for you…You can customize this sword in terms of tsuka ito, sageo, blade length, etc at NO additional cost ! Only if you like to have a part of the saya in rayskin there’s a little charge. This offer will only be available until beginning of November. Once the swords are here, there will be an extra charge for all of these options.
For our US customers, we will have these swords available in our US warehouse so you will save a BIG time on shipping & additional customs charges ! The approx. shippingcost within the US is estimated on $15-$20. Contact us by mail if you need more info.
Anyway, that was it for now…if you have any questions about these new swords here, drop us a mail or catch us with the live chat 
See you !
Feel free to tell what you think about these swords…we can still change them at this point…
4 Responses to “We received the new sword samples !”
By Patrick on Oct 24, 2007 | Reply
Hi,
couple of suggestions:
1. Why yet another katana with a Bo-Hi?! Every “china-wannbe-katana” has a Bo-Hi, I would rather see a blade without a bo-hi.
2. The customisation is interesting, but the blade itself is not that spectacular, just another one “off-the-bunch” of Chens etc.
3. Why monosteel?
4. You say the price is cheap? The blase is around 400€, which I would consider normal for a monokatana with machine polish.
Sorry, maybe something for beginners
Rgds
Patrick
By admin on Oct 24, 2007 | Reply
Hey Patrick,
We will be offering these blades with our without bohi..so there’s one problem less here
. The blade is indeed not ’spectacular’ but for that price you can’t expect a good polished blade of course. You can count double of the price for blades with a descent polish..
We took monosteel because they just perform the best for cutting tests. Most of the folded steel swords doesn’t do a good job with tameshigiri. At least not the heavy cutting excersises. But we’re working on that and folded and even yu-steel blades are on the ‘to-do list’. More on ths later..
I think the price is not bad if we put these swords next to the forged sword range (+€600) of Paul Chen for example.
But you’re right, you get what you pay for..If you prefer a nice polish, etc you will need to spend more €€€
I just don’t agree with your ‘a sword for beginners’ statement. It just depends what you’re looking for. If you’re a collector, I can imagen this isn’t the sword your looking for. But if you’re a practitioner that is looking for an affordable, good quality sword..I know lot of experienced practitioners that are using 300-500 euro swords and they’re al happy with it.
Different people..different taste
Take care !