$200 Katana VS $2000 Katana - How to Spot a FAKE!

[Music] katanas pretty sweet right but have you ever wondered if that sweet ass katana you bought at the mall was perhaps a little too friggin sweet to be true perhaps the man with the ponytail who sold it to you told you it was battle ready made of glorious nippon steel well by the end of this video you'll be able to tell the quality of a blade before even pulling it out of the sheath and if that doesn't get you laid i don't know what will is your katana real or fake we live in a world full of lies and deception and if you don't know anything about katanas you could get totally ripped off can you tell the difference between high carbon steel and fork metal in order to do so you'll need to know what makes a katana real or fake [Music] nowadays you can buy katanas anywhere you can get them on amazon pawn shops that one weird store in the mall that sells dragon statues for comparison i have two katanas here one is an authentic paul chen kami katana priced at around two thousand dollars this thing has it all a hand hand-forged folded k120c powdered steel blade that's differentially hardened using traditional methods you can clearly see the tight grain pattern created by the folded steel this sword is furnished with the highest quality fittings that paul chen offers including real gold inlays and beautifully handcrafted details this sword truly is a work of art and today we're going to compare it to this 200 sword i bought on amazon yesterday for starters you got to consider how much you're spending and where you're getting your sword from if you're buying a 20 katana off ebay from a guy who calls all his swords battle ready full tank damascus steel then he probably looks like this and you're probably gonna have a bad time and the nice thing about these practice katanas oh oh that hurt the only website i know that sells real swords and calls them battle ready is cult of athena but that's because that website was made in the year 2000 and it hasn't been updated since i feel like i'm gonna throw it now the absolute minimum you're gonna need to spend if you wanna buy a real katana is around two to three hundred dollars now that might seem like a lot but the way i see it these swords are like works of art it's like buying a really expensive painting only difference is this piece of art can cut a man cleaning two most of the time you can tell the quality of a blade just by its furnishings no one's gonna dress up a crappy blade with nice fittings one of the easiest ways to tell if a katana is fake is by the thickness of the sagueyo now this is the cord wrapping that is around the scabbard and it's a guarantee that if they skimped out on this they definitely skimped out on the blade the segayo should be a nice thick silk cord wrap if it looks like a cheap polyester shiny shoelace that's super thin like this then it's definitely fake this will also apply to the handle wrap there's a quick test you can do by taking your thumb and attempting to move the handle wrap up and down on the handle if it moves too much on the handle that means the core wrap is both cheap and the person who did it didn't do a very good job next is the ray skin now this is one of the most difficult things to fake on a katana because race skin tends to be pretty expensive real katanas use real dried stingray skin on the inside of the handles to give the cord wrapping something to grip onto while fake katanas use molded cheap plastic imitation ray skin an easy way to spot the difference is real ray skin tends to have deviations in both the size and patterning of the bumps and also you should be able to see a clear separation in between the bumps on real ray skin as opposed to molded plastic let's compare these two hand guards the kami katanas has intricate painstakingly hand carved details gold inlays and is cast out of thick high quality iron do you say that the comic katanas has the kami katanas has now onto the amazon sword the handguard looks cheap and brittle the gold is painted on poorly i wouldn't trust this handguard to protect my hand from even a judo chop and you got your name g child let alone a sword strike first i'm going to take a look at the amazon sword uh what huh okay well um i guess it's to protect the [Music] scabbard from from the oil i don't know or maybe protect the blade from the inside of the poorly made scabbard okay [Music] all right so the first thing you're going to notice on a katana is the temper line or the hormone it is the wavy pattern on the blade traditionally the temper line is created by applying a special type of wet clay onto the edge of the blade for the final firing process i'm not going to go too into detail but generally when you forge a sword the higher the temperature the more flexible the blade while the lower the temperature the harder and more durable it is traditional katanas do both in a process called differential hardening this allows the spine to remain flexible making the steel more resistant to breaking while at the same time retaining a super hard durable edge the kami katana has a traditional paul chen style wave motif going about the hormone and you can tell that is actually a truly differentially hardened blade i mean just look at this this [ __ ] is beautiful and because it's all done by hand it means that no two swords are ever the same now when you compare to the amazon sword this hormone is clearly fake it's cheaply acid etched onto the blade you can tell because the edge is the same color as the rest of the blade and the only discoloration is where they did the acid etching this means the blade was not differentially hardened meaning the edge is probably quite weak and brittle now i'm no metallurgist but i feel like it's safe to say that this probably isn't even made of high carbon steel i would never recommend using this for cutting sure you could slice some water bottles in your backyard with it but anything more than that you risk the blade snapping and potentially really injuring yourself oh that got me good so overall i don't ever recommend buying one of these fake swords even for display purposes sure they might look cool and they're cheap but if you consider that for less than a hundred dollars more you can get a legitimate real katana it just seems like such a waste of money ronan chenis and paul chen all make quality entry-level katanas for under 300 that are hand forged and meant for cutting i'll have links to them in the description if you guys are interested all right guys hope you learned something and if you want to check out some more katana videos check out matthew jensen's drunk sword reviews he's a really funny guy who knows a lot more about swords than me and he definitely deserves more views alright guys thanks for watching i'll see you guys next time [Music] you

Channel: Cerberusarms

Views: 2,235,112

Rating: 4.9441948 out of 5

Keywords: katana, review, sword, beyond belief, amazon

Id: gJh1qurSlkY

Length: 7min 17sec (437 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021