SAS

I have troubles, make a post saying you will give it to me, Stephen (just kidding, I don't need the tsuba ) Kudos to RKG for his generosity, and good luck to the entrants.

Very nice! A very good candidate for shinsa indeed!

http://www.bushidojapaneseswords.com/about-us.html Info on Bob Benson and Woody Hall here.

Swords do have a limited number of polishes before they get "tired"; as Stephen notes, swords can be enjoyed without being in pristine polish. It looks like the last polish was done in a rather coarse manner, and more steel would need to be removed to take out the scratches. Near the hamachi, this would result in more kizu showing. No need to rush into anything; keep it oiled and take it to shinsa....just my opinion (but you do have my recommendation if you do get it polished.....good polishers will take condition into account.)

Bob Benson and Woody have my vote as well; I have seen them at work in person, and both have won awards in Japan.

Thanks Dave, great article. Very enlightening and dispels some old conventional "wisdom".

I have seen examples of modern mono steel blades that have been thermally cycled in order to reduce quench warping; sometimes this has the effect of creating alloy banding which is indistinguishable from the hada of some Koto masterpieces. Food for thought.

Or Arizona or Oregon....you can own full auto machine guns there!

Nice looking sword.

I read that people panned for gold, same process for satetsu i would imagine, but I don't know if they ever built sluices like in the West. I did read about how they went to areas where granite rock formed riffles, which would concentrate the heavies.

http://d-arch.ide.go.jp/je_archive/english/society/wp_je_unu8.html Found this, looks pretty good.

There are too many mischaracterizations to address individually in the last post; needless to say, steel itself is primarily iron with only trace elements added, such as varying amounts of carbon (usually less than 1%) and other elements. Color of the steel does not rely on polishing but is inherent in the material. Even though the tatara method does not result in complete melting, there is sufficient fusion to result in varying trace elements to be incorporated based on material inputs. These cannot be visually identified by the smith; the smith sorts materials based on their characteristics before and after being heated and quenched, then broken. Higher carbon materials break under those conditions, while low and medium carbon materials are more resilient. There is a lot more to say but I am sure Ken can contribute a LOT.

Been there, done that, as G. Bush said, "Not gonna do it"

Sort of reminds me of another unmentionable topic..... appropriate preservation should always be the goal.

Sorry my editing skills are not up to par; last phrase attributed to Rokujuro is mine.

Maybe a shin-gunto that used to have a life in a different koshirae and then was mangled to fit something else???

I suspect that in early days the smaller scale of the bloomeries producing tamahagane would yield a different material than the limited run yet mass-produced tamahagane produced taday. This seems like a good PhD thesis for someone to compare tamahagane recovered from archeological sites versus currently produced material, and run spectrographic analysis on them. (Hey, wait a minute, I think that may have been done....anyone remember reading about that?)

I like the seller and have bought other items from him in the past; the state of polish and sketchy provenance of the mei ( I suspect gimei) leaves me out even if I were in the market.

I think when appearance of certain activities in the steel becomes conflated with "better" and swords are no longer tools but become "artifacts" or "art", we lose sight of the origins of the objects, and the intention of craftsmen to make the best tool they can using the technologies they possess with the materials they have. Since I bought Nagayama's Connoisseur's Book of Japanese Swords, I have often wondered at his characterization of steels as "strong" or "weak". Obviously this had no real bearing on the material strength and bore mainly on appearance alone.

I have read that in earlier times, local resources were used; later, scalability and consolidation of some processes meant that local variables were no longer extant, such as the various mineral elements. Still early here, hope that makes sense.

That was.....ummmmm......strange.

Looks like the whole sword in the display was lacquered in a thin red.

Without regarding the mei, my thought would be Koto katate uchigatana. Nice find.

That is the first I have heard of a "preservative coating of lacquer" being used on nihonto. Is anyone else familiar with this practice? Also, banning Muramasa swords due to their effect seems like some modern politicians who blame a device for what the owner does with it.