Mongolian "Ish" Dao?

I could not understand why Kris Cutlery Dao Qing was not battle ready, It is 1060...go figure
Anyway Kris Cutlery Dao 4 is battle ready and you can get one from KoA for $275. To be honest I don't know the quality or handling about Kris Cutlery Dao so someone here might be able to help.

Anyway it is here:
www.kultofathena.com/product~item~KRSDAOIV~name~Kris+Cutlery+Dao+IV.htm

You can always contact Garrett for a price quote of a custom Mongolian Dao. No harm asking. My guess is maybe over $300 but tell him you're from SBG forum and you get 5 percent off.

I am not sure if Hanwei dao are suitable for cutting (maybe it is?). The jian is not for cutting for sure.

Edit: could not get the KoA link to work but try this:
www.kultofathena.com/swords-chinese-br.asp
Dao is somewhere in the middle with $275 price tag

I have the Hanwei Kung Fu Sword for sale right now, save ya a chunck of change if your interested... /index.cgi?board=selling&action=display&thread=10258

It's a nice feeling sword... but like most Non-Katana Hanwei products, it could stand to be a bit sharper. For the money tho, it's great.

I suspect the Kris Cutlery Dao would be much better... the edges on the Kris Cutlery swords I have gotten have been very nice... but they make a lot of blunt and practice Dao's... they cheapest functional Dao is around 250 - 275 and thats a decent chunck of change.

Well, I love Mongolian BBQ. ;D

If you're looking for cheap take a look at this:

cgi.ebay.com/Handmade-Martial-Art-Chinese-Kung-Fu-Dao-Sword-Sharp_W0QQitemZ170343203952QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item27a93f0470&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=65%3A12|66%3A2|39%3A1|72%3A1205|240%3A1318|301%3A1|293%3A1|294%3A50

I've got one and it isn't a bad sword. Very light, pretty sharp good thick tang. The scabbard looks a lot nicer than it is--cheap wood pieced together covered with some artificial leatherish material.

Me TOO!!!

As for the OP, hey man, I say go for it.

Guys:

I've "done the deal" with Shadowhowler for the Hanwei Practical Kung Fu (Gong-Fu, whatever) sword. I know it won't be a true representation of a Mongol saber, but it will "scratch the itch."

Here's a short story about Mongolia. It's a true story. Right after I married my wife, I "had" to go to Mongolia. Poor poor pitiful me, right? Oh, Br'er Rabbit, don't throw me in the briar patch! It was a two week gig, under a USAID subcontract, working on drafting a joint venture agreement for the sale of the state cashmere company. Under USAID rules, I could only work 40 hours a week.

Ulaan Bataar is the capital, and it means, in Mongolian, "Red Hero." Yup, it was renamed after the Soviets got a major hand in, in the early 1920s. I ended up hanging out a good bit with one of the drivers, who had been, in the 1980s, a driver for the Mongolian Embassy to the USSR. We drank some vodka and ate some mutton.

Friday afternoon we finished up early, and had the chance to head out to a national park where they were reintroducing the Prizhevalskiy horse. We call it the Prizhevalskiy horse because Prizhevalskiy introducted them (for the second time) to Europe, and they actually disappeared from Mongolia. But what we call the Prizhevalskiy horse, we ought to call the Temujin horse, or the Genghis Khan horse, because it's the same shaggy, stocky, stiff maned little pony that rode to Moscow, and China, and Persia, and India, and drowned in great numbers off the Sea of Japan.

The national park dedicated to the "Temujin" horse is a couple hundred miles from Ulaan Bataar, and at least a hundred miles from the next source of electric lights. When the sun goes down, the sky is not black. The sky is orange and purple and red, and the purple is a deep purple, like velvet, and you feel that, cliches notwithstanding, if you could stand just an inch higher on your tippy-toes, you really COULD gather in the stars, like jewels, to be your playthings.

Most of the gringo staff I was working with, they didn't want to go out to see horses, but a couple of us did. All the Mongolian staff went. The blonde accountant brought Jack Black, and I brought Jack Daniels, and when we ate, we were sitting around in a circle, passing the bottles around, under the stars, the stars so close you could gather them in.

They butchered a goat for us, the visitors, and put it in a steel can, and added garlic and green onion and salt and pepper and water, and then they used tongs to take hot rocks from the fireplace, and add them to the can, and sealed the can. In thirty minutes, they opened the can up, and we passed around the hot rocks, from hand to hand, easy to grab ahold of, hard to hold on to. We had individual bowls of the broth, and there was a single platter of the meat and onions. Where the rocks had pressed up against the meat, the meat was seared, otherwise, it was tender, steamed, delicious. We sat in a circle, a gringa, a gringo, the Mongolian staff from USAID, the Mongolian staff from the park.

We slept in a ger, on wooden framed beds, under woolen mattresses.

The next day, we saw some Mongolians hawking, loosing sleek hawks from their wrists against marmots as big around as my thigh. We went out and saw the herds of taki, the indigenous Mongolian horse, that shaggy little pony that conquered the world. They were few in number, but the trend lines were good.

We drove back to Ulaan Bataar, in newish jeeps with air conditioning and stereos, listening to Europop music . . . but somehow, still, to this day, there's a part of my heart that's still in Mongolia, sitting under the stars, so close you could gather them in, passing the bottle around, drinking from the bottle, eating that good meat, the feel of the hot rock still in your hand. . . .

Maybe not everyone would have reacted the way I did, maybe some people would have found it trite, or boring, or too too.

But I have a feeling that when I am drawing my last breath, when the faces of my wife and children, my father and mother, have flashed before my eyes, before my eyes will flash the night sky, the laughing faces of those Mongolians, those Mongols, I met and bonded with, and the taste of airag in my mouth, and the stars, so close, so close you could gather them in if only . . . .

"What it tastes like" is something I struggle with. Somehow it just don't seem right to fall back on the ever popular "it tastes like chicken" (which I've heard about everything from rattlesnake to alligator). Goat doesn't taste like mutton, it's not as heavy and gamey, to me, goat tastes somewhere between beef and pork.

This was absolutely stellar goat meat, though. The time span from bleating to eating was probably about an hour, and these guys knew how to butcher. Very tender, very tasty. Admittedly, the setting probably contributed to the meal itself.

kilted...I could almost see what you were talking about; settings such as those are what makes life worthwhile, to see it, give witness to it later on thereby enriching those around you. Who knows, I may walk that path one day and if I do, I'll be looking for what you yourself saw so I'll say thanks now, because I know I'll be feeling it then.

Mongolia?
Been there, enjoyed the nomadic life some 3 weelks in a jurta, nearly joked on cooked goat's eyeballs, given to me by the host as a speciality.
Later my friend and travel companion got so sick by riding on camels all day long, that we had to be airlifted to the next hospital, because his intestines were totally intertwined. The surgery was done in Beijing, a few days later, it's nearly 20 years now, but he 's still fighting with bowl problems.
Never made it back, only by Trans Sib through Mongolia to Moskow, and though it's a cheap ride, it's rather boring.