peterm1_nihonto

I have been "making do" with a large hardwood door stop which is wedge shaped and a mallet with a rubber head piece on one side and hard silicone on the other. I glued a piece of felt on the base of the wedge to avoid scratching the blade as the base of the stop can contact it. Of course, with a really tight tsuka this may be insufficient but is an option.

In general I like to keep the koiguchi full shut with no gap when the blade is in place. Your Sensei's advice about not splitting the saya is only relevant if the koiguchi is already too tight - not if it fits correctly. If your gap does not rectify itself, after the shirasaya acclimatizes, I would suggest relieving the koiguchi a bit so the habaki does fully engage. This can be done with a small needle file (sets of which are readily available (and usually cheap). Obviously, slowly and carefully is the way to go as taking too much wood off just creates a new problem to solve.

I have been working on some tsuba with a couple of perhaps slightly unusual approaches which are non invasive and non destructive. I have been using the kind of thick wool felt that is sometimes found in hardware stores etc. to use under vases, objects d' art etc to prevent them scratching tabletops. The thicker the felt the better, as it is more rigid than thin stuff, though it is still soft enough to conform to different shapes. An advantage of this approach is that this stuff is already backed on one side by double sided tape. I can therefore cut off small portions to temporarily "glue" it to a finger tip or to the tip of a tool like a piece of bone as a rubbing "bob" if I need to work on smaller areas. So far, I have found that gentle rubbing helps very much to get rid of areas of superficial rust without being aggressive enough to cut through it to bare metal- though care is always needed of course. Nothing is applied to the felt tips other than mild "elbow grease" (i.e. gentle effort) and repetition. But more aggressive adherent rust still demands the traditional approach of using bone or ivory "tips" applied selectively to these areas. Another similar method I have begun to try is to use soft upholstery leather for the same kind of purpose. One side of leather is smooth, the other rougher - like suede. Either can be used similarly to the above but of course it might be useful to use a small piece of double sided tape on the side that is not doing the rubbing to help hold the leather onto a finger or to a rubbing "bob". I am yet to decide if the rougher "suede" side is too aggressive or not. I suspect it also depends on the type of leather but I repeat I am using soft furniture grade leather (an offcut given me by a friendly upholsterer). Oh and BTW a larger sheet of the thick felt (about 100mm x 100mm say) is also useful as the tsuba can be placed onto it while working on the other side. The felt is soft enough not to do any damage to the tsuba (e.g by abrading high spots) but "grippy" enough to hold it relatively securely while it is being rubbed. This also keeps one hand more or less free, which is useful.

Cheers. No problems.

Hi Brian In principle I am happy for members here more generally to have the files. If they are distributed to members in this manner though, it may just be worthwhile making sure there is no legal impediment. My guess is that these should be copyright free due to their age and nature but if there is someone you can ask to be sure it would make me more comfortable. (e.g. is there any impediment to their private use for research etc.) In the meantime however I will send you the link pending that. cheers Peter EDIT: Message sent to your email address.

Good idea. I had given up on cloud storage a few years ago after finding I did not really need it and forgotten about Dropbox - having uninstalled the app. But on checking I still have an account intact, so I reactivated it. As I have no need for Dropbox long term, I also have no plans to pay for a subscription as now seems to be required at least for some classes of membership, and I am not sure if my account version is still wholly free (as it was originally) or just a part of their current 2 week "try it for free" offer. If it's the latter case the files will not be able to be made available for long obviously. So there could be a short window. On my quick scan of Dropbox it requires me to authorize downloads individually to nominated persons and their email address is required for this (I think the system sends them an email with the d/l link??) So SalaMarcos its there if you want it....let me know. These resources are incidentally ones i have never seen before (not that I have much experience) and should be of interest to an academic, writer or general researcher on this topic. The screen grab below gives an idea of the range of materials:

I am not sure if this helps at all. A few years back when researching all things Nihonto just for fun I stumbled on the links to old books on tsuba - which were then available for free download on the internet having been scanned by libraries. The books I found are well out of print so images they contain may be free of copyright. (I have not checked the state of the law in this regard however but I downloaded them from a legitimate web site I am sure, so they should be) When I was researching I probably used search terms like "tsuba pdf" and "nihonto pdf' and "free download" I recall getting a surprising amount of freely available material - some of it old scanned material as I have said above. Of course you may have already done this as part of your own inquiries but others may enjoy the links so I have taken the liberty to provide it. The only link I presently find in my system is this one - http://nihonto.com.ua/books/16.pdf (I believe the source of this was the Boston Museum) Other old scanned books (mostly from the early 20th century or older) originally from a wide variety of museums I have downloaded include the following listed below. I vaguely recall that some years ago Google had a project to scan such old books and make them freely available online, and I have a feeling that my downloads had some association with that project though I can recall little more. ( But here is an article about it: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-08-10-what-happened-to-google-s-effort-to-scan-millions-of-university-library-books ) I had a quick look online just now but could not quickly see the download link(s) I used when I downloaded them but if interested perhaps see if you can private message me through this site and I can email them to you though there are about 250 meg of pdfs so it will not necessarily be easy - some email systems still limit attachment sizes I think. I suspect that you will be able to find the D/L links yourself by searching on the names provided below in any event as it has only been a couple of years that I have downloaded them myself so hopefully they will still be available . Some are in Japanese, one in German - but all have photos or line drawings (tracings) of tsuba and in many cases have a large number of them. All books are in pdf form : " Choshu Tsuba by Ogura Soemon" " Akasaka tsubako-roku by Amiya (Soemon)" " Cooper Union Museum - The Japanese sword and its fittings" " Higo Kinkoroku by Nagaya" "The Japanese Sword and its Decoration" " Japanese Sword Mounts in the Collection of Field Museum" " Japanissche Stcihblatter und Schwertzieraten Sammelung Georg Oeder Dusseldorf" " Nihon Tsuba toko roku by Ogura Soemon" " Senso to Tsuba by Tsuneki Nagaoka" " Tagane no Hana, Nara Toshihisa" "Toban Shokan Kotetsu by Matsumiya Kanzan" " tsuba-and-Japanese-sword-fittings"

I like the effect of the piece undertaken by Bullet Sprinkler. I think the style of work is known in Japanese as Negoro Nuri although this name is usually applied to a finish with an undercoat of black lacquer and a top coat of red (rather than the other way around) and piece in this thread may have a different name in Japanese. Someone here may know. Never the less the result looks very nice. Although given this is a Board on Nihonto and this is perhaps not strictly the place for my post, I never the less wonder if anyone here has tried using an urushi substitute (not the cashew one) for modern sword fittings. A year or so back I tried a formulation based upon one I found in a pdf download on modern saya making. It suggested that a reasonable and safe substitute could be made with high quality spar varnish (so named for the wooden spars on sailing ships) combined with coloring powers based upon the iron oxides commonly available in hardware stores for coloring concrete. I wanted to lacquer my first serious attempt at saya making (not for a nihonto) but lacked the confidence to do so using urushi for my first attempt which in any event was difficult to get and besides I was a little worried about dermatitis. The process involved a 25mm super fine brush from an artist's store and of course mixing the varnish with a suitable quantity of oxide powder to get a runny but moderately thick, creamy consistency. I did not make a note of the proportions I used as I varied it over time as I experimented. Instead I went mainly by the consistency of the resulting mix which desirably is thin enough for even brushing but thick enough to provide good coverage. The proportions of oxide I used though was about 10 of black to one of dark brown - I did not want jet black result but was after a final result that had a little complexity and depth and judged that a small addition of brown would achieve this - which it did. Of course such oxides come in a small range of natural colors including a red very similar to the one used as the base coat in the test piece in this thread. A further advantage of the spar varnish substitute was that in warmer weather it is possible to achieve up to two coats a day if the first is applied early enough. Unlike urushi which of course is notoriously slow. When each coat is dry I cut it back lightly with 2000 grit wet and dry paper or 0000 steel wool (when an extra cut was needed) before applying the next. I made a purpose built stand to hold the saya either horizontally or vertically and rotate it to facilitate the coating process and hold it while it dries. I applied approximately 20 coats which gave it a robust and superb finish with great depth. The final polish was made using an ultra fine metal polish which gave a semi polished satin look. I have since been experimenting with a Japanese style Ishime (stone finish) saya using the same products as described above but applied differently. This is messy and a little difficult but achievable using more or less traditional techniques and modern materials. The sword saya must be held horizontally in the above mentioned fixture and able to be rotated. A layer of oxide colored varnish based lacquer is first applied to the saya and while still sticky and only partly dried, dry oxide powder is sprinkled onto it from above in a fine cloud. This can be achieved by using a small kitchen wire strainer over which fabric from women's stocking is fixed so the powder falls through it in a fine mist. The result is then allowed to dry fully. Although this will mean only some of the powder that is directly in contact with the underlying varnish will stick. The remaining powder must be brushed off and the process repeated to build up the coats. However, I found (and this is cheating a bit) that using a spray can of clear varnish coat the resulting finish could be sprayed to further bond the otherwise loose top coating of powder to the undercoat of varnish based lacquer. The whole process is then repeated as many times as needed and several top coats of varnish based lacquer applied to give durability to the final finish. A quicker way (involving even more cheating - but effective) is to buy from the hardware store a small pot of stone textured paint. Apply this as the foundation coat, use a stippling brush to make sure there are no brush marks in it and when it dries then do as I have described above. Using this technique you will get a much quicker stone look effect as the base coat already has a significant stone texture. I have used these techniques a few times now and find them to be effective and durable though durability depends on the number of coats used and in general more is better. None of these techniques are suitable for anyone working on a real Nihonto of course, but for reproduction swords / koshirae they do the job very well indeed, looking quite authentic and being robust. I further refinement on the ishime finish that I will try with my next experiment is to use different lacquer colors in the bottom and top coats. In the final stages a light rubbing with wet and dry paper cuts through the higher ridges in the ishime finish allowing a random pattern of different color to show through in much the same way as the red and black in this initial thread. For those not familiar with ishime this picture from the internet gives a good idea of the basic effect on what looks like a real Nihonto saya. http://www.ryujinswords.com/Pictures/Services/DSC_0088.JPG