Repro Sword History

Now that's the kind of input I'm looking for! Thank you SanMarc... anybody else have comments?

The internet has been a huge, huge, insane monster benefit to niche communities and groups of every sort. If it's building dune buggies, collecting Gibson guitars, enthusiasm for steam engines, or reproduction swords, the internet allows people to find folks with similar interests, and also allows companies in these niche markets to correspondingly find these rare enthusiasts.

I wore a kilt for about three years, all the time. When my interest started to develop, I hit the ol' internets and tried to find out more. There were a couple of Celtic shops in Houston that carried kilts, but in mere moments I'd found a couple of different forums devoted to kilts, and discovered Bear Kilts up in Canada, a custom maker of modernized, poly-viscose kilts, and SportKilt, and USA Kilts, and, of course Utilikilts. It was dead simple for me to find not only vendors and manufacturers, but reviews of products, advice on sewing your won kilts, all kinds of great stuff. There were people on the forums not only from all over the US but from Europe, England and Scotland as well. And Ireland, and Japan, and Brazil.

I believe USA Kilts had set up as a primarily local Pennsylvania kilt shop, but by working the internet, finding the enthusiasts, targetting their niche market, they took off like a rocket. Their kilts are great: made to measure out of good Scotch wool, comfortable.

If it hadn't been for the kilting sites I'd have ended up with some crappy ol' acrylic off-the-rack kilt and never have gotten into the whole kilty thing. Similarly, if it wasn't for sites like SBG, I'd have ended up with some crappy SLO and said "This whole thing sucks" and just thrown my hands up and walked away.

I'd argue that euro reproductions mostly sucked until the mid to late 1990s. When I stumbled on Swordforum in college (back when it was still mostly a Highlander fan board), the only two swordmakers considered halfway decent were Deltin and Arms&Armor. Of those Deltin was favored because they were significantly cheaper (Deltins are made in Italy and the dollar/euro exchange rate favored the dollar at the time). Deltin had geared the line mostly towards live steel reinactment since at least the early 90s. Their swords had decent balance and were strong, but most were 8 to 16 ounces too heavy in order to stand up to the rigors of getting smashed together all the time. Deltins showed up on Highlander every week and I think Christian Fletcher might have even customized them (although he mostly made armor back then). Around this time MRL dropped Deltin after being bought by Windlass. A lot of their early stock was basically Deltin copies with cosmetic features moved around. This is why the Classic Medieval looks like DT2130 with a round pommel instead of brazil-nut.

But things were happening in the background during the late 90s. The big thing was the European sword arts were starting to take off. The first big books I remember were John Clements '97 and '98 Renaissance and Medieval swordsmanship books. Then he was working with the HACA, now called the ARMA. The growth of the internet allowed ESA niche groups to organize, grow, and interact. It got the good books publicity on sword boards. You could also buy them on Amazon.com because your local bookstore sure didn't carry them.

The growing ESA community wanted good cutting swords. This lead to the rediscovery to two different swordmaking concepts: distal taper and harmonic balance. Distal taper was known, but not really employed that much and let you lighten the sword without sacrificing performance. Harmonic balance made for a sword that was a comfortable cutter by placing the primary vibration nodes is the right places. Albion was founding '98 but didn't really get going as a manufacturer for a couple of years. Gus Trim swords were well received, but I'm not sure that he ever really set production records. Some of Albion's early stuff were Gus Trim blades I believe. But these were all middle end swords for the ESA market, not lower end swords in the SBG price point.

While ESA was taking off, the dotcom bubble burst and the dollar plummeted against the Euro. Deltin basically disappeared on the US market as the exchange rate switched from pro-dollar to pro-euro and destroyed their price advantage. Inexpensive swords on the US market were manufactured in countries with cheap labor where they could still make a profit like India, China, and the Philippines. Not in developed nations like Italy or even the Czech Republic.

Around 2002 Hanwei got into the European market in a big way. They'd built a good reputation on their Chinese-made katanas in the late 90s. Their practical line offered basic but good European swords for less than $100. That was wallhanger pricing at the time, but these swords were actually pretty good. People were really annoyed when they found out the edges were so thick on most Practicals that they weren't worth sharpening. You had to spend more for the sharps and still do. I believe Hanwei started marketing a lot of their stuff through CAS/Iberia around this time. Previously Iberia was a company with a big distribution base that sold wall-hangers and sword-like objects almost exclusively. In 2006, Hanwei bought Iberia outright.

Honestly, I think the combination of Hanwei and the higher end manufacturers like Albion put a lot of pressure on the whole market to improve through a combination of pricing and performance. Now we have a whole lot of custom and semi-custom smiths doing design work for the major manufacturers. Hanwei is putting out Tinker Pierce designs among others. Valiant is making Trim/Fletcher and soon Lundermo stuff.

I didn't really cover Japanese swords. Basically Hanwei revolutionized that too. Prior to the late 90s you couldn't buy a decent katana if you wanted one. If you could find one, it was probably all wrong. Flattened saber grinds instead of proper convex cross-sections, etc. I think that some of this stuff might still be archived at the old Sword Forum Magazine Online pages at Sword Forum. They had whole articles about how everything was wrong.

Paul Chen basically revolutionized it by bringing out properly differentially tempered katana at a reasonable price point in the mid to late 90s. When they first came out you were talking $1000-1500 for Bugei and $400-700 for his Musashi and Golden Oriole. Maybe it was 400 and change for the katana and 650-700 for a complete daisho. That's a lot of money, but it's sure cheaper than Nihonto or full custom. But the Hanwei early stuff had it's problems too. The edges tended to be brittle because the temper process hadn't quite been nailed down yet. Some blades were shipping with edges in the low to mid 60s RC instead of the high 50s.

Kris Cutlery was also importing a good katana back then as well. But it was very non-traditional. Their current product line has normal wrapped tsukas. Their late 90s line had 27 inch and 29 inch katana that looked like they came from a space opera. The metalwork was bright brass and the wood was glued and covered with a weird fabric wrap. They were good cutters, but some people went as far as stripping them down to the blades and having custom furniture built for them.

And those were your options, Chen or Kris. A year or two after the Musashi and Golden Oriole came out, Chen brought out the Practical Katana for an even cheaper price point. But to do it he cheapened the swords with plastic in some of the wrong places. The blade itself was quality but other fittings weren't. Not everybody was happy. Other practical katana variants came out following that as Hanwei tried to hit on the right market mix, but I think a lot of manufacturers smelled blood in the water.

The first manufacturer I remember really challenging Hanwei was the Last Legend series from Gen2. And they challenged, I remember pictures of them directly comparing their swords to Chen's. They offered stouter blades than Chen in two different sori with more options for the buyer to satisfy a wider variety of price points. Some of the JSA folks liked them or at least said they did. I pretty sure one guy who liked them the loudest was on their payroll.

After them I think everyone started pumping out katana in China. I can't even keep track anymore. Certain steels would get hot or not. Then everyone was talking about the Masahiro and Musashi sub-$100 blades that might not suck.

I remember when the only thing you could find were decorative swords made in spain, and a few hand made ones at SCA events, usually not for sale, here are some picks of one I bought when I was around 12 years old sometime in the mid 1970's
probably made from an old leaf spring, rather crude, the guard is carved out of a brass bar, the pommel is hollow, nice wire wrapped grip possibly from a spanish wall hanger, nice tang though and it will flex 90 degrees and return straight every time! (its been done hundreds of times) holds a decent edge it has never bent or chipped and I have cut thousands of bamboo stalks, branches, cardboard boxes, and more things than I can remember, it is the size of a nice riding sword 28 3/4" X 1 1/2" blade with nice distal taper, 35 1/2" total length, weight is just under 2LBS, cost me $30 (a large sum for a kid growing up in the ghetto in the mid 70's) I put a EMSHS blade next to it for comparison

it does look like the excaliber movie sword a bit, only the movie came out in 1981 and I got the sword in the early to mid 1970's, I never had much interest in fantasy or asian swords or anything overly decorative, even when looking through books or going to museum's, it always bugged me that they had so many pages or display space dedicated to things that were obviously not meant to be used, I wanted to see the real deal! something that was carried into battle! not some fancy engraved jewel encrusted ceremonial piece,