Samurai Sword Buying Guide: Which Katana is Best?

hey guys this week for weapons wednesday i decided to show off some of our samurai swords we started carrying some really cool ones so i just wanted to show you what they look like all right so see we'll start with this guy here okay i chose this one specifically because it's a little bit different from a lot of our other swords okay so this is our unsharpened hand forged samurai katana and if you look at it it's got a completely unsharpened blade it's made from a 1045 carbon steel which is actually perfect for this kind of sword it's great an unsharpened sword in general is perfect for martial arts practitioners because it allows you to practice your katas perform in your dojo do tournament katas without being worried about hurting someone else or hurting yourself with a sharpened blade and the really nice thing about a 1045 carbon steel is that it can easily be sharpened so if you wanted to make this a sharp blade that'd be pretty easy to do but if we look at this um it's actually really cool we've got uh ray skin in the handle which allows for better grip the suba itself which is this part right here the sub is just really a really cool decoration and it's a nice solid suba if you look at the blade itself you can see the hammond line which is where it's been heat treated and you can see it's just a really really cool ham on line so i like the sword i think it's awesome uh for people who are looking for an unsharpened sword um you really can't go wrong with the sword so it's pretty cool i'll put that guy back real quick okay so the next one i wanted to show off is one of our most popular swords and it's actually up top unfortunately but the reason this sword is so popular is because it comes with so much so this is our hand forged samurai katana i'm just gonna move this over here but what's so cool about it is it comes with this decorative box which makes it really nice for being able to store for a while you open it up and we've got a nice sword bag that's over the katana itself and it also comes with this sword maintenance kit which here let's take a look at that first i don't even know what's in this so it'll be interesting to see but it looks like we've got a couple different types of oil in there and we've got a cloth a cleaning cloth um get the little powder ball we got the hammer these little hammers are kind of neat they're like a little brass hammer that's used to put the little wooden dowels with wooden pins in through the handle so you can take off the blade and put it back on and clean it so that's kind of a neat little sword cleaning kit and let's look at the sword itself what i like about this too is this is a fairly inexpensive sword considering everything it comes with okay so yeah this is a full tang sword which is nice which means that the blade itself actually goes all the way through the handle um it means it's going to be pretty good for actual slicing um the blade is uh it's a hardened high carbon steel i'm going to guess this is a 1045 carbon steel you can see that's got the hammond on there where it's been heat treated yeah so the souba itself is really decorative and nice there's some pictures of some samurai on it really cool suba and it's got a long blood groove going down the blade which is uh preferable for most swordsmen the the handle itself has faux ray skin in it which that's definitely a preference of sword practitioners uh whether they want to have real ray skin or whether they want to have faux ray skin the ray skin in general is good for grip and they put the core the wrap around the ray skin to hold the wrap on there better um but in the feudal japanese time they used real ray skin like manta ray or stingray even sawfish sometimes to hold the wrap onto the handle better it just provided a good grip um but nowadays a lot of people do prefer a faux ray skin but that's just a preference up to you as far as how you want that go but this is this is a really cool sword especially for its price coming with a gift box in fact it's full tang the nice subah it's got a it's got a wonderful weight to it it really does and it is a high carbon steel blade so you would be able to sharpen this i think it's just an awesome sword in general so i'm gonna put this away and um this one right here i thought would be a good one to show you i i like this i actually love these swords but there's a lot of misconceptions about them so that's why i want to show it to you i think these are so cool all right so this is a traditional japanese shirisaya sword and um if you notice the sword itself doesn't have any suba it's basically just a wooden handle no decoration it's just a really nice shiny wooden handle and scabbard but a really nice blade on there so when you watch movies like sword fighting movies uh often you'll see especially in like hollywood films you'll see japanese warriors fighting with these swords these shirasaya swords and the problem with that is this type of sword was never made for combat in feudal japan often there would be a bladesman or a blacksmith who would make the blade but they didn't make the adornments for the swords they didn't make the subas they didn't make the the wrapped handles so they would make the blade and they'd make it perfect but then they'd hit they'd put it into a casing which is the shirazaya and that would be basically like a carrying case for the blade while they were still making the suba in the handle and this was often just used for transportation for storage but a lot of people like to actually use them for you know sword fighting and stuff like that too but that's not really what they were made for but they look really great on a mantel or on display they're just a really really cool sword so definitely recommend a shirasaya because they just look cool especially if you have a nice sword stand you can put that on top of you know your fireplace or something i'm going to put that guy away and the next sword i'm going to show you is a little bit different it's not very traditional at all let's see okay here we go okay it's not very traditional at all but i wanted to show it to you just to see something that's been more popular as of late and that's the anodized blade so if you want something that looks a little bit different when you're buying a sword um actually kind of a cool idea because so many people when you see their sword collections it's like the same sword over and over you know a black scabbard with a you know just standard carbon steel blade but this sword is a little bit different it's got an orange scabbard which is different in itself the suba is very decorative it's like a golden copper looking suba pretty cool looking but the blade is what i really wanted to show you so this is a standard 1045 carbon steel blade which means that it can be well sharpened it's already it's actually very sharp already but they they anodized it so it's got this beautiful golden copper color to it which just makes it look a little bit different from other swords so i really like this it's you see it a lot we've been carrying some different ones we've carried ones that have like a blue finish on it we've had copper we've had gold we have a bunch of different finishes on a bunch of our different swords um but that's the reason i'm showing you this sword it's uh it's a pretty cool pretty cool color on the blade so i'm gonna put that away and okay so this right here is one of my favorites that we have right now i absolutely love this sword and this is the full tang carbon steel samurai katana all of these swords i'll put links to them at the bottom of the video so you can find them on our website uh but i just absolutely love this sword and it's so obvious when you look at it like look at this the suba this is just beautiful this is a brass suba it's a little better quality than a lot of the other subas you can see in the handle it's got real ray skin just very well made you can just feel the quality in this sword the blade itself is one of the coolest things about it this is actually a 1060 carbon steel blade and the reason why you always see a ham on on these blades is because the spine of the blade or the back part of the blade needs to be more flexible than the blade itself the blade itself has to be super hard so that when it's actually slicing something it's not going to chip but the blade itself has to be slightly flexible so that it doesn't break or shatter when it's when it's striking an object a lot of time on these swords you'll see that the ham on is kind of like very symmetrical it'll go in a certain pattern but if you see that it's not very not really a pattern and you can tell that it's actually the heat that created the ham on that's a sign of a really good sword blade so i really like this sword this is 1060 carbon steel well heat treated the soup is amazing on this and the weight the feeling of it is just perfect and you can see throughout the handle like you can see the peg there is going into the second part of where the blade comes down this is a full tang sword for sure the blade actually goes all the way through the handle and down to the base a very very good quality sword so that's that's probably my favorite that's on the site right now um but if there's any other swords that you'd like to see a video review of uh just let me know in the comments below um i'd be happy to show them off for you in a future video so anyway have a great week guys we'll see you soon

Channel: KarateMart

Views: 36,458

Rating: 4.7800832 out of 5

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Id: 1Rn9hTdCFk8

Length: 12min 27sec (747 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021