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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aaron L" data-source="post: 517068" data-attributes="member: 926">If you want TRUE information about katana, or nihonto, look at  <a href="http://www.geocities.com/alchemyst/nihonto.htm" target="_blank">http://www.geocities.com/alchemyst/nihonto.htm</a> Links to smiths that make traditionally forged nihonto. Several thousand dollars, but anything else is either a stainless steel wallhanger or something made in Spain.  Or for actual antiques, you can get real old swords for $5000 or less if you look.  But be aware that the cost of polishing/sharpening the blade (the same process) will cost several hundred to several thousand dollars itself.  As a side note, modern sword smiths in Japan are limited by national law to producing no more than 24 nihonto a year.The folding was to get a latticework of carbon throughout the blade, and the blade was laminated (sandwiching layers of metal)  with a varying number of layers, hard on the outside and softer on the inside.  Then the blade was quenched with clay on the back edge, creating martensite along the sharp edge and soft steel along the back, with a harder skin around a softer core throughout.  Martensite is a vary hard form of steel, used for industrial tools today.   This allowed the blade to be hard where it needed to cut, and soft where it needed to bend.Damascus steel was steel that had been pattern welded.  Pattern welding was taking strips of iron and twisting them together, adding carbon as necessary, to create a latticework of steel, and then welding the braids together into a blade.  The Vikings did this as well in the Dark Ages.  The goal was the same and the end result was close in all three methods, making a blade that could bend and still cut.   Although the Japanese method is the best documented by far, the common misconception that European swords were worthless compared to Japanese blades is not true.  You just won't be able to find a modern traditionally made European sword to buy anywhere.If the sword on e-bay is anything less than several thousand dollars, it is a fake, or possibly a machine made WWII gunto (which in and of themselves hold some value)-sorry for babbling-</blockquote>

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