Project

[peterfitz]

I recently bought a fairly crappy iaito - a sword intended for iaido practice. The blade itself is made of spring steel, I think; it's reasonably hard (though not nearly hard enough to keep an edge for more than a minute) and fairly flexible. Fortunately, I don't really care about having a blade sharp enough to cut the wind as long as it has the

Comments

[jsr]

If you Cut The Wind in front of someone, it's only polite to say "Excuse me!" or possibly to blame it on a nearby pet.

[basal_surge]

Urgh. Be very wary of the blade, I find that even the approximations of carbon steel in that quality of facsimile blade are very dodgy, and tend to break or shatter if one uses them in re-enactment combat. Mind you, I don't know how often and what level of impact you guys expect your blades to take.

[peterfitz]

No contact whatsoever; it's destined for kata cutting only.

[basal_surge]

Fair enough, then. We medieval types, both the stage fighters and the guys putting back together actual martial arts from the late medieval fencing manuals, have to be very picky over our blades, as in the stage fighting and sparring, while all the blows are pulled and the blades are rebated, we've come to like very good steel, as there's still a lot of blade on shield or blade on weapon haft, or even blade on blade impact, so having a blade snap in combat is a real danger.