Sorry, been away a while. Too busy...

FWIW, I've been working on my photography of sword blades. I just finished up a piece for a good customer of mine and I wanted to try to get good shots of the steel. It was a challenging polish to say the least. For those who don't know, this blade is *very* unusual in that Howard folded his very clean 1086 custom steel with wrought iron. It has a very tight ko-itame hada and the steel is *hard*. And I mean HARD. The stuff laughed at all my attempts to polish it and bring it up the way I wanted. I spent more than 4 times as long on this one blade as I have on entire katana.

I suppose maybe the reason is the higher carbon content as well as the profuse vanadium carbides in the steel, something the old Japanese didn't deal with. The problem became getting contrast in the blade while bringing up the folding pattern without making it look like a pattern welded western blade (which it most certainly isn't in look or feel). It would have been easy to just etch the bloody daylights out of it and call it a day, but that's not the look of the Japanese aesthetic. So here the challenge was getting the traditional look to a blade made in many respects very traditionally. But using a material that is *very* different and just not amenable to the same look. Lots of work. Lots of experimentation.

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Also, part of this was to work on my photography rig for these things. I think it came out pretty good... If I get some better photographs of the entire mounting today I'll post them.

10" nagasa folded 1086 tanto, hira zukuri, by Howard Clark. Polish and mounting by me.

Nice job, Keith ....
I'm starting to wonder what your better at , polishing or photography ?

Very cool detail there , thanks for sharing ! Mac

Thanks, Mac. I always appreciate your posts. The tip on something I'm working on for you is driving me nuts... Gonna be a fun piece though...

Anyway, to the topic at hand... A few more pics fwiw.

Closeup of the blade itself. The photo was done to show the ha-hada and hataraki. Sorry about the dust on the blade, but I was getting pretty tired when I took the shots...

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The koshirae. Aikuchi, lacquered same', custom made "horn" fittings themselves lacquered to match. Obi-hook placed per customer specs to fit his favorite obi, menuki from Ted Tenold. Gold dust is sprinkled in the lacquer going from more intense at the end of the saya to solid black by the koiguchi.

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Finally, here's a test shot I did with all the shop lights on. Sorry about the dust, etc, but the photo was done for myself to compare and contrast lighting. Fortunately it shows the entire hamon pretty nicely...

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Hi Keith

Is the big O giving you headaches *g*

It's going to be really cool to see where you take it ...... Many thanks , Mac

Keith,
That is really wonderful work you show us.
It is good to see something that inspiring.
Thank you!