Tampa 2014 report

[Jean]

I am with Guido on this, each polisher has his field of excellence (by field, I mean Nihonto schools or era). Even the best ones. They will never ruin a blade and will do very good polishing Job on any blade, but not an excellent job on some blades (hitatsura) or era (shinto, koto, shinshinto).

 

Be careful depending on your blade on the choice of the polisher. Ask before.

[Soshin]

I think it is interesting to note that not one person on the shinsa team made any comment whatsoever about the polish on the blade, which I believe they surely would have had it in fact been "terrible".

 

Hi Everyone,

 

While I never saw the nihonto in question as I had a very busy show. Chris B. makes a very good point above. I have seen more than a few nihonto fail NTHK shinsa in the USA because of terrible polish and/or poor condition. This was starting back in 2004 before I joined NMB and more actively collecting nihonto.

[raiden]

for me, I always send the blade to the polisher that specializes in that certain type of sword. I wonder how many people out there on this group have used more than 20 different polishers ,much less than 8 different Mukansa grade or higher polishers? Or send more than 30 blades a year to different polishers seeing both the before and after results? I have.

[Curran]

Moderators:

 

No table flipping please.

The thread has its merits.

 

G's naming names was just the Captain Obvious.

Not having seen the blade, nor really caring to do so, I never asked the polisher of anyone.

Didn't need to do so, as it was rather simple fill in the blank.