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Post by juardian on Feb 7, 2023 21:30:45 GMT
Hello all, I wanted to post this here since Dragon Sword has been popping up more frequently as of late. They sent me their S7 katana for review and it goes for $540.
I'll summarize quickly here Pros: Fit and finish was overall fantastic. The tsuka was nicely shaped with great transitions for the ito onto the fuchi and kashira. The saya fit is the best I've experienced, with no scraping or rattling of any kind. The kissaki seems pretty snug as I put it in. I also find the sword attractive overall despite "normal" katanas not being my thing.
Cons: (Very subjective) I rag on the fact that they used a cheap red crackle saya on this sword. I understand that some people won't care or will like the saya anyway since the fit is more important. $540 is a lot for me and for that price I would want a sturdier and nicer looking saya myself.
I did a very basic test with the blade since the S7 steel is probably the main selling point. I cut bottles, did a few cuts into ice, then cut bottles again. I was very out of practice with bottle cutting, but noticed major dulling from the ice. The sword had a sturdy and not razor sharp edge out of the box. Definitely not saying that this proves the steel is bad or not worth it, but between that and how easily the blade took scratches (from a light swing into a rotten stump and again after ice) I'm not sure what advantages the S7 has that justifies the price over a well made T10/1095 blade. Maybe more durability from abuse? I didn't want to do destructive testing but that may be an advantage.
Overall I said the sword wasn't really worth the higher price tag. There are certainly strong points, but the price is higher than I could justify given that I'd be just as happy with a less fancy steel for what I do. I tried to show it the best that I could despite my inexperience with nicer swords. I hope this review can help someone else decide if it's worth it for them. Hope I didn't come across as too negative and I'm definitely interested in how their more budget options perform.
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Post by Roscoe57 on Feb 7, 2023 21:56:53 GMT
Good review. I looked at this one and ended up buying the Z-Sey S7. I haven't cut with mine yet. Z-sey has a video of the S7 hacking through a group of 2x4's with no edge damage.
alientude on YouTube is supposed to be making a review for the Dragon Sword S7 Katana also.
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Post by alientude on Feb 7, 2023 22:03:41 GMT
Yep, my review of the Dragon Sword S7 will be posted 2/24.
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Post by Roscoe57 on Feb 7, 2023 22:11:20 GMT
Yep, my review of the Dragon Sword S7 will be posted 2/24. Long wait.
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Post by alientude on Feb 7, 2023 22:13:11 GMT
Sorry, that's February 24, 2023.
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Post by juardian on Feb 8, 2023 14:20:30 GMT
Sorry, that's February 24, 2023. That will be very cool to see!
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Post by juardian on Feb 8, 2023 14:21:19 GMT
Good review. I looked at this one and ended up buying the Z-Sey S7. I haven't cut with mine yet. Z-sey has a video of the S7 hacking through a group of 2x4's with no edge damage. alientude on YouTube is supposed to be making a review for the Dragon Sword S7 Katana also. How has the handling and general fit and finish seemed on your Z-Sey? They've been getting some great reviews.
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Post by ShadowDancerSwrods on Feb 9, 2023 7:10:16 GMT
Rotten wood has a lot of impurities, which will scratch the sword when cutting, so this cannot be used to evaluate the strength of the blade. Also, the better polished the blade, the more obvious the scratches will be. About the saya, the saya of Japanese Sword is mostly made of materials with good air permeability, rather than strong materials. If comparing two different steel, should keep the sharpness and the degree of the finish the same. An unscrupulous comparison is unprofessional.
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Post by shmorky22 on Feb 9, 2023 16:15:11 GMT
Oh wow ShadowDancerSwrods ! You're here. Coming from a knife collecting background I totally agree - Its extremely hard to compare steels as there are so many other factors, polish, geometry, heat treat etc. ( see cedric & ada steel tests for an example ) I live in the country and chainsaw trees all summer - You are 100% right, if I cut into a tree with a rotten core its basically the same as dumping my running chain into a bucket of sand.I maybe get through one tree and have to resharpen my whole chain if it is rotted. I actually just bought a sword from you because of these reviews, looks like you guys are doing a great job with your fit and finish and general quality and I think if you guys keep it up people will notice. I think not just for me but for a lot of us the tsuka and fit of everything is very important and a lot of the midrange blades fall short.
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Post by Tiers1 on Feb 9, 2023 23:25:21 GMT
Thanks for the review. The S7 swords started exclusively with Byzer and now are sold by Z-sey and Dragon Sword (along with S5 steel swords). I also found them on coolkatana.com which as far as I can tell is a reputable site. Kind of interesting that both of these very uncommonly used steels are sold by three (if we include Byzer) purportedly separate companies. Occam's razor leads me to believe there is a very good chance that...well, feel free to draw your own conclusions. Also, Dragon's tone of response and passive aggressive last sentence remind me A LOT of the Byzer owner. If he responds aggressively further I would say he probably is the Byzer owner.
That being said, S7 as the material is irrelevant without the proper heat treat. Matt Jensen destructively tested a S7 sword from Byzer and though it performed very well, it file tested at below 55hrc. The point of S7 is to manage relatively high hardness (for a through tempered sword) with very high toughness. Having the sword be softer kind of defeats the purpose. I have had 1060 swords down around 52hrc that were basically unbreakable. Did you by any chance see Matt's review of the 'romance of men' Hajimari katana? It's unknown steel between 50 and 55hrc and he literally could not break it. The scratching while not necessarily one-to-one indictive of soft or hard steel makes me very curious what a file test would show. I was actually about to buy one of these, but your review has me again questioning whether the steel and expert heat treat we are being promised are actually being delivered.
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Post by ShadowDancerSwrods on Feb 11, 2023 4:40:42 GMT
Oh wow ShadowDancerSwrods ! You're here. Coming from a knife collecting background I totally agree - Its extremely hard to compare steels as there are so many other factors, polish, geometry, heat treat etc. ( see cedric & ada steel tests for an example ) I live in the country and chainsaw trees all summer - You are 100% right, if I cut into a tree with a rotten core its basically the same as dumping my running chain into a bucket of sand.I maybe get through one tree and have to resharpen my whole chain if it is rotted. I actually just bought a sword from you because of these reviews, looks like you guys are doing a great job with your fit and finish and general quality and I think if you guys keep it up people will notice. I think not just for me but for a lot of us the tsuka and fit of everything is very important and a lot of the midrange blades fall short. Thank you for your trust. We are determined to be the best company in mass-produced swords (fast delivery speed and higher quality in the market). Yes, the sword performance evaluation is a very complex step, it involves many aspects. If not professionals and professional equipment, generally can not get the correct results.
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Post by ShadowDancerSwrods on Feb 11, 2023 5:15:11 GMT
Oh wow ShadowDancerSwrods ! You're here. Coming from a knife collecting background I totally agree - Its extremely hard to compare steels as there are so many other factors, polish, geometry, heat treat etc. ( see cedric & ada steel tests for an example ) I live in the country and chainsaw trees all summer - You are 100% right, if I cut into a tree with a rotten core its basically the same as dumping my running chain into a bucket of sand.I maybe get through one tree and have to resharpen my whole chain if it is rotted. I actually just bought a sword from you because of these reviews, looks like you guys are doing a great job with your fit and finish and general quality and I think if you guys keep it up people will notice. I think not just for me but for a lot of us the tsuka and fit of everything is very important and a lot of the midrange blades fall short. Our S7 adopts vacuum heat treatment with a hardness of 55-57(error ±1). Since it is an overall heat treatment and the position of shinogiji doesn't have bohi, we can use hardness tester to measure the hardness of the shinogiji position for verification. The hardness is much higher than 9260 steel on the market at present. Our product is very different from Byzer's, so there is no such thing as the same owner. And I also think there is no need to test the steel. For S7 and other types of steel, if we know the hardness, we can find a lot of other professional information of them online. You can see various performance indicators of this material. I think it's unprofessional and misleading for reviewers to use the words "probably," and "I thought" and unscientific testing method.
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Post by jckang on Feb 11, 2023 14:21:15 GMT
Thanks for the review. The S7 swords started exclusively with Byzer and now are sold by Z-sey and Dragon Sword (along with S5 steel swords). I also found them on coolkatana.com which as far as I can tell is a reputable site. Kind of interesting that both of these very uncommonly used steels are sold by three (if we include Byzer) purportedly separate companies. Occam's razor leads me to believe there is a very good chance that...well, feel free to draw your own conclusions. Also, Dragon's tone of response and passive aggressive last sentence remind me A LOT of the Byzer owner. If he responds aggressively further I would say he probably is the Byzer owner. The owners of Dragon Sword and Byzer are different people. I have spoken to both, and their voices, cadence, and intonation are different.
Byzer's owner has a Taiwanese accent. I can't place Dragon Sword's owner's accent, but it is certainly mainland Chinese, and not norther or southern.
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Post by Roscoe57 on Feb 11, 2023 14:45:00 GMT
The big question is: Are Dragon Sword and Z-Sey the same company?
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Post by Tiers1 on Feb 11, 2023 15:07:13 GMT
The neutral tone of Dragon's recent responses might be some indication he isn't the Byzer owner, as the Byzer owner would almost certainly already be angry and defensive.
The Z-sey S7 sword is on coolkatana.com without Z-sey branding, which kind of leads me to believe that site is wholesaling the model from a factory or warehouse. This is similar to how I have seen swords that are dead ringers for LK Chen swords for sale direct from Longquan middleman sellers on ebay.
I sincerely wonder if to this day we Western sword buyers are still totally misunderstanding how Longquan mass market swords, or at least Longquan mass market swords destined for the west, are set up. Is everyone just selling from the factory but claiming their own forge? We now know that is the case for cheaper and mid range stuff. Maybe it's the case for everything? If that is so, then the sellers we are in touch with really have no information other than what the factory tells them. And those factories like any mass production factories anywhere don't always deliver what is on the spec sheet. I am not accusing anyone in particular, this is just a thought experiment given many sorts of overlaps I have seen from Longquan products.
Also for whatever it's worth Matt Jensen's evaluations of 9260 swords from Longquan showed that they were too hard, not under hardened. This could make sense given that 9260 needs a different heat treat than 1060 and the 'ole heat to critical and quickly pull in and out of a pan of oil before letting it air cool may not work for that steel.
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Post by ShadowDancerSwrods on Feb 12, 2023 6:35:32 GMT
The big question is: Are Dragon Sword and Z-Sey the same company? I am good friend with the boss of zsey. The population of Longquan City in China is only 80,000, so many people in our industry are good friends. Zsey gives us some technical support, including polishing, habaki, saya, and a small number of fittings. Because these are unique to zsey, they do a good job, and we can't buy the same products from a third party, so some of our products look similar. I'm currently trying to get more fittings from Zsey, but apparently Zsey's boss won't wearing to. Haha
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Post by Ryzamurai⚔️ on Feb 13, 2023 11:12:16 GMT
The big question is: Are Dragon Sword and Z-Sey the same company? Yes this is the biggest question.👍👍👍
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Post by Roscoe57 on Feb 24, 2023 15:11:19 GMT
Whoa. I can't believe Dragon Sword said this on the YouTube page.
Dragon Sword 2 weeks ago There are many mistakes in your review. We have asked our operation department to strictly evaluate the reviewer and not to send products to non-professionals of Japanese Sword for free.
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jester
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Post by jester on Feb 24, 2023 22:27:33 GMT
Whoa. I can't believe Dragon Sword said this on the YouTube page. Dragon Sword 2 weeks ago There are many mistakes in your review. We have asked our operation department to strictly evaluate the reviewer and not to send products to non-professionals of Japanese Sword for free. I mean, he told everyone not to buy the sword based on scuffing the polish and not liking the saya. Nope. He said "considering you can have a sword identical to this one in T10 or 1095 for about $200 less that also performs identically, in my opinion it isn't worth to spend those $200 more for S7 steel". Which is a major point. Why spending 500 for a steel that performs identical to one priced 300?
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Post by gabriellewhite on Jun 7, 2023 12:39:52 GMT
Regarding the S7 steel and its performance, it's interesting to note your observations about major dulling from ice and the ease with which the blade took scratches. While you didn't conduct destructive testing, it's possible that the S7 steel may offer more durability in terms of withstanding abuse. However, you bring up a valid point about the price justification when compared to well-made T10/1095 blades. Overall, your review provides valuable insights for others who are considering the purchase. It's great that you tried your best to showcase the sword despite your relative inexperience with nicer swords. By the way, have you ever considered adding dragon figurines to your collection? They can be a fantastic way to incorporate a touch of mythical charm into your display.
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