Suggestions of How to Improve the NMB for 2023 ?

[Franco]

New Years Greetings to All!

 

As the title states, suggestions, what would you like to see on this NMB moving forward?

 

I'll begin with these two below; 

 

1. Closer adherence to keep posts within the forum topic. 

 

2. A standardized form or forms for listing items for sale, at the very least for swords.

    If known of course, asked but left blank otherwise:

 

including;

 

    Time period? Tradition? School? Sword smith?

    Sugata: Overall length? Cutting edge length? Shape? Sori? Mune? Moto-haba? Saki-haba? Moto-kasane? Saki-kasane? Kissaki? Horimono? 

    Jihada: Masame? Itame? Mokume? ... https://markussesko.com/2015/05/13/kantei-2-jigane-jihada-2/ ... Utsuri? Ji-nie? Other? 

    Yakiba: Nie? Nioi? Ko-nie? Types of hataraki? 

     Boshi: https://markussesko.com/2015/06/10/kantei-3-hamon-boshi-3/

     Nakago: Ubu? Suriage? O-suriage? Yasurime? Mekugi-ana? Horimono? Machi-okuri? 

    Polish: Polisher? Condition? Ubu-ba? 

    Habaki? Koshirae? Shirasaya?

    Flaws: ? 

    Approval period?

 

Origami?

 

Thoughts?

 

Thank you.

 

Best Wishes, 

 

 

 

 

[Brian]

Good topic. Please feel free to comment folks, I'll consider all of them.
Will look at your listing format Franco. Difficult with some people not knowing enough, and military swords etc...but some form of format would be reasonable. Will work on that.

[Franco]

31 minutes ago, Brian said:

Difficult with some people not knowing enough, and military swords etc

 

 

Hello Brian,

 

Thank you for your consideration. I think that having standardized forms with check boxes, a given answer, would help with resolving "some people not knowing enough."  The format I used here (nothing special) was based upon a kantei write up I used for the Rochester Study Group meetings. Which covers pretty much all of the bases of what a potential buyer as well as the seller should know, or will want to know, about a particular Nihonto. And, I'm betting the military sword afficionados here on the message board would be more than happy to do something similar for military swords. 

 

Regards,

[waljamada]

I'll start with some things on the other side of the coin.

 

For members/users it would be great if people started (or continued) creating dedicated materials/content off their collections and personal research/interests/knowledge. 

 

Videos sharing categories in their collection..."unboxing" videos of new swords that arrive in their collection...collection tours...set up/display tours...a cleaning katanas conversation video (talk about a topic while you clean a blade)...just make content that suits your interests/abilities and what your comfortable with.  It can be anything and everything.

 

If you don't want to make videos then little "report" write ups of nihonto in your collection.  If you have many blades by a specific smith maybe a little thing on the blades of similarities, what makes you collect that smith etc...if you have a niche, what do you love about it?  Are you a tosogu guy?  What's in your collection and what drew you to it?   Do you have a favorite tsuba...what is it and why?  Did you piece together a tsuka set?  What was your vision and what did you come up with?   Are you a dedicsted military nihonto collector...why....what variations are your favorite...what's in your collection?  Any topics that float your boat.  Videos can be only 2 minutes long even and filmed on your phone and I do think videos would be the most beneficial type of content to create.  Personal opinion.

 

I'm also going to walk this walk (have a few videos planned and in the pipeline) but wanted to do a "call to arms" of sorts for the NMB members/users.  We can make a forum post called "NMB Community Theater" or something where we post the links of the videos we create to keep an archive and concentrated source that can keep growing.  Write ups can be seperate posts for the current/future collectors to search up, read and enjoy.  I'm so grateful for all the old posts and can't express the joy when I find one perfectly targeted on what I was looking for.

 

Edit: Just now saw a great example: Ray Singer posted this video using his collection for Nihonto content...Bravisimo!

 

 

[1kinko]

Any chance of subdividing tosogu into hard (steel, iron) and soft (copper, shibuichi, shakudo, etc)?