Lareon

The price it sold for originally is close to the max of what i would pay. it's a decent amount for a low serial number, But 9,000 usd?

I use Renapur leather basalm, brings back the suppleness of the leather and helps to protect the leather

a couple of years ago I purchased from the estate of a collector a bag full of parts. It contained some interesting items, a tsuka wrapped in a cloth, some seppa, fuchi kabutogane etc was supposed to be a bag of unused parts not reclaimed from items but collected post war. all of the parts were pristine and brand new a few items that came with it too were leather gunto covers i've sold a couple of them since but i still have a couple my photos here are of two covers, one is full but with an original patch of leather in the middle fixing a break, potentially battlefield fix the second is a complete leather part that hasn't been finished by the workshop, no end cap and no stitching marks of a removed one I've kept them smooth and supple with leather wax and basalm and they are pretty nice

I've got a few In good condition. Also have 4 on their own that I picked up at an arms fair

is the thread about this sword

ok, so used the liberal amounts of choji oil and a small shim of copper to clean the active rust off. Night and day now and i still have the dark black patina but far less rust.

I may rub a little copper shim over the mei, not sure if anyone has used this trick before i've used it on antique rifles before, the copper is softer than the iron and removes some of the rust without affecting the barrel.

Ended up removing the barrel in the end, constant tapping with my palm and some choji oil along the edges of the barrel to loosen any rust helped, slowly it came apart and revealed a very heavy rusted barrel underneath. I've oiled it up and removed some of the active red rust. It's difficult to photo the kanji on the barrel due to the rust while with nihonto i would never try and clean anything up im tempted with this to try and remove a little more rust but will await an opinion before i do that.

It has 6 petals yes, the breech plug unfortunately is missing from this teppo. it did give me the confidence to go back to my osaka variant and remove the barrel, will add photos to that thread in a minute

Home now and have my camera, here's a few shots of details on the barrel.

The one I posted? I bought it off of you this year, remember

The shock of the blunt force is not stopped by armour so bones and organs are destroyed even through the heaviest armour. Like a western maul of war hammer. If this is what you meant?

Took the barrel off to see beneath Has the number 44

@Bruce Pennington received and in hand, only a small anchor stamp and the number is correct. I can see the nakago has been cut off crudely at the end. seems so strange to put so much effort into these then just roughly cut the nakago at the end, it's not even straight. the belt that came with it seems to have a name written in ink inside of it (while not related to the souvenir mounted sword i assume, it's a nice thing to find) says Matsunaga Seiichiro

Less Decorative than my first, This one doesn't have the decoration like my osaka variant. Not removed the barrel at all but once i have it in hand i'll take some more pictures.

The belt with mine is navy but I just assumed it was added by the previous owner.

Both of mine are missing the pan cover

I'm guessing the Souvenirs never came with the sword belt as the sword belt has two clips and the saya only has one ashi

looks like the kanji for 3. the mind goes to the kikkawa clan first but this different, the sizing of the horizontal lines looks the same as san (3)

I have one very similar, not to hijack the thread

Here is a Hidekage blade i have in bad polish but it's possible to see the hamon still, see if you can get something along the same lines

I would definitely be interested to see how far into the hamon the edge removal has gone. It can be really tricky to photo especially out of polish, if you can catch the hamon in a photo would be good. the right angle and either good sunlight or a light from the back edge of the sword can pick it up. might not be possible to see but i've managed to pull the hamon out of some really poor conditioned swords I cant imagine it's too far to make it a problem though based on your photos, boshi may be different