Brian

Jesta's Vesta :-) Sorry...had to say it. (Vesta is the name of these matchbox items, as Piers mentioned)

Whoever the winner is, I'll also throw in a year Gold membership. If you are already one, I'll extend it by a year

Nice job, looks understated and elegant.

Guys, before we get carried away, I have no plans on charging for listing or buying. It's tempting, but that is one of our strengths and I think it generally works well. Maybe I can look at a system where a person gets a badge if they have done X number of successful sales, so that they have somewhat of a "verified" badge that sets others at ease, but that we'll look at later. I've just bumped up the hosting with more webspace. Just means the bill in a week or 2 will take all of the Gunto proceeds that is up for auction currently, but at least we won't run out of space. Advertising will likely happen, nothing too intrusive. Guys who take advantage of the services here like translations...well the board is self regulating, and as you can see they get called out. Nothing I need to do...you guys handle it for me :-)

Indeed, sorry but story not withstanding, this remains a Chinese fake from what we can see

I have looked at advertising, and have been playing with placement and it is ready to go anytime. The problem is twofold. Would dealers be willing to pay for it? And #2...the logical thing is to say that Gold membership exempts people from having to see ads. That is easy to do. But if many of the Gold members are serious collectors and the target market, would advertisers not be against a system where paid membership exempts the very market they are trying to reach? It's a problem in my mind. As far as charging a small fee for some translations, my issue with that is that I am indebted to the members here who do those translations. We have many skilled, helpful members here who give of their time and effort to do these translations. The problem is that if we were using this as a revenue stream, from my own morals, I'd want to give back to those guys. They do this largely without any reward at all. But if the forum is making something from it...however small, I would feel obligated to try and give back to those guys. And how do we do that? How do we judge who puts in more effort or who is more accurate or who spends more time on them? It's a morality issue for me, and I already battle with feeling like I don't give back enough to the guys who assist here with info constantly.

I am always hesitant to make changes that affect others that aren't so..."oblivious" But seems something may need to be done in this case. Hmmm. A membership would at least have been appropriate a while ago. Especially considering the hosts just advised me now we are almost up to our 125 GIG allocation, and I'm going to have to buy more server space. Sigh. Still....125 Gigs of images here is quite something. Try publish THAT as a book

Because it's not a wartime blade, it's earlier and remounted, and guys are treasure hunting/hoping.

It's a Chinese fake, sorry. Inscription has no purpose. This is a bad one. Next one will be better

Marc, Probably best to post a pic so that guys don't have to go Google it.

Just a bump for this. Current high bid is Michael's at $600, still a steal for a nice WW2 sword.

Regular high grade isopropyl alcohol. Wipe as many times as necessary, then a light oiling on a soft cloth or tissue. Minimal is fine.

I have been getting some contact from members saying they are unable to access the forum the past few days. Oddly, some of these are via pm's, which mean the members were on the forum at the time. I also don't have an explanation of what exact problem they are having, but I'm looking into it. I think there may be some attacks on the server lately, flooding with hacking attempts...maybe DDOS or otherwise. But if anyone is experiancing issues and can describe exactly what the error is, it will help. I have no doubt it will be temporary, and we'll get it sorted. Just need to identify exactly where the issue lies.

Bruce, so far I have seen no stamps on it at all anywhere. I I have looked quite hard.

The Toshinaga is sold. The other 2 still available.