It's not much...

blue seriously good advice- khuks are still underpriced on ebay if you can recognize period markings and styles of blade, but all in all if you are into antiques, pay the extra price and get a verified one with provenance, the dealer should be able to tell you which british diplomat/soldier stole it from which people, no better advice than that from blue--- buy your antiques from western colonial powers , UK has been my primary source, but there are some really great dealers in the USA too

estate sales are a dream, people posting about stuff they have no idea over, but the fact is real collectors soon spot this and the bidding goes up to a regular antiques dealer price

there are about 6 or 7 extremely good international antiques dealers on the internerds, just googles and you will find them, they are worth it if you are looking to invest in antiques instead of just collect stuff you fancy, collect stuff you fancy that appreciates in value ! if you are willing to talk to people most offer payment plans , as I am doing now with a couple dealers. I have a kora on the way next week, will post here when I get it ! its really great looking
 
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I used to be a firm believer in if it's too good to be true it probably isn't. Dealing with HI I no longer subscribe to that theory. My Katana was and is too good to be true and it's still and always will be too good. My 25" Siru directly from the hand of Auntie was and always will be too good to be true.
It still holds true in almost every other aspect of life though. It pays to do your homework and watch out for snipers. Worse than vultures in my book.
 
I won't mention it again I promise. And honestly for the first time in at least an hour I wasn't thinking of you when I wrote sniper, but now you reminded me so you floated back to the top.
It hurt though, you gotta know it hurt. A beautiful Bura chopped out from under me. In the bag, happy happy happy and then wham taken out in my prime. Hulk Hogan dropping on me from the top of the 3rd rope, squashed like a pancake, a thin swedish pancake, aww the humanity.
I'm starting to tear up again, flash backs of sad days. NO worries I'll get past this..............................someday..................if I live long enough....................or not.
 
The field trip offer still stands. You can send it back whenever. Think of it like a piece of fine art on loan to a museum. It would look real nice next to your other one! :thumbup:
 
More Advice:

Don't buy anything from China. There's just too many fakes and reproductions out there. Don't buy anything Chinese from China, and definitely don't buy anything non-Chinese from China.

Be careful of anything much smaller than it ought to be. Souvenir knives/swords are usually small enough you can fit them into your luggage. So if you see a small suitcase-sized version of a sword that should be much longer, be extra careful.
 
Yeah, the hard way :)

Also be careful of anything from India or the Phillipines. There were and still are many manufacturers of reproductions in India. Usually they say "Made in India" on the blade somewhere, but sometimes the seller elects not to show you that part. There are also a lot of Indian knives on ebay that are essentially just old kitchen knives. They aren't fake or tourist pieces, but you're basically paying $40 for somebody's old steak knife. Lots of tourist knives from the Phillipines too for some reason.

On the European side beware of any sword made in Toledo, Spain. It's almost certainly a reproduction. From what I understand they haven't made real weapons in Toledo for a very long time.
 
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philllll said:
The field trip offer still stands. You can send it back whenever. Think of it like a piece of fine art on loan to a museum. It would look real nice next to your other one! :thumbup:
Click to expand...

Nice offer but far too risky. I'm sure it would be love at first touch and I can't go the rest of my life looking over my shoulder to see if you've found me. I guess I could put mirrors on the chair to save neck strain, naw better not. I'll look at the pics now and then and be happy and not mention low life pond scum vulture snipers ever again on this forum.

We be loving not hatin!
 
You must be a brave man to snipe Bawanna after seeing his arsenal!

I've had fun swinging my new dagger around. It's very light and makes that "zip" sound like in the movies when you swing it. You could cut somebody up to ribbons before they knew what happened. The balance of the knife is towards the hilt so you couldn't strike somebody with any force, but I'm sure you could open someone up like a bag of mulch if you used a draw cut.

Anyways, time to go up on "THE WALL". I need more hangers

 
I officially declare that the It's not much title is no longer appropriate. Walls looking good.
 
Yeah, I better edit the thread name to "It's a bit much" and in a month or two "It's way too much".

I had to break almost all of the advice I gave in this thread, but I finally won a Kaskara! The auction had very blurry pictures that don't show the blade well, it was described as a "WW 2 sword" and listed under Japanese sword, it and shows virtually no signs of wear. So my guess is that it's a cheap Kaskara sold to some GI 60 years ago, and it's probably not much older than that. Nice Kaskara blades were often rehilted many times over the century as they got worn out, so it is possible the blade itself might be older. It's impossible to say without looking at the blade. But as I said in my advice, if the blade was worth looking at the seller would probably have taken better pictures. It's probably a crudely forged piece of scrap spring steel. I'm keeping my hopes very low.



 
just bought this, has not arrived yet but thought I would show it off since I think its pretty impressive









dug this up by asking someone about a year old advert for a totally different dha, turns out he had a collection with some of the things I was looking for , like this kachin dha
 
Very nice one Gehazi! That one has some nice markings on blade and handle. Looks like bone? Amazing what you can find by just asking eh? The good thing about that is if you know the collector then most of the footwork has already been done.
 
W-O-W! I absolutely love that blade. What a nice deep fuller. I bet it has some age to it.


I won this a few weeks ago, hasn't arrived yet. It's supposedly a Dao from the Adi tribe, which lives in India and Tibet. I'm not 100% convinced that what it is, but we'll see. The blade looks like crap compared to yours but I like the hilt.


 
that hilt is def hand woven, and yeah the blade grabbed me too, looks very similar to the one I posted originally asking for a custom
 
That blade puzzles me... the age and deep fuller make me thing it's a 200+ year old European made blade, but the blade shape is clearly a dha. it's not like somebody took a European blade and repurposed it. Take better pictures when it arrives :)

Here's another guy I bought recently.



The seller described it as an African machete, but when it arrived it was clearly a cut down European saber. The hilt is what a saber hilt looks like when you remove all the metal and leather. There's a crack on both sides of the hilt that look a lot like the crack I got when I tried to use a hickory hatchet handle to make a handle for my antique khukri blade.

I've been cleaning the blade slowly as to not damage it. Both sides have a vines/floral pattern, but one side has a coat of arms and the other side has some other pattern. I see an axe head in there and some sort of flag and who knows what else.





My conundrum is this: was this ever a "real" blade, or just some decorative piece? The blade, even cut down to 10 inches, is really really heavy. There's no fullers or anything either. I don't want to waste my time cleaning and researching it if it's just a decorative piece. But if it was decorative, why did they cut down the blade? And they didn't just saw it straight off, they bothered to put a very rounded point on it. And how did the hilt get damaged? To me it looks definitely from use, but maybe somebody dropped it really hard. And where did the rest of the hilt go? Maybe if it was as ornate as the blade somebody removed it for the scrap metal value. Lotta mysteries...
 
very cool, fun when you get something you dont expect , it looks old, but like you say is it just decorative? and yeah I will take better pics when the dha arrives-- omg keep posting blue-- must make this the antiques super thread that never dies-- also I see what you mean, it almost looks like the other edge was cut off and the tip taken out, but I can see where you got the "european blade" idea, because it does look uncharacteristically well made for the region(thickness)
 
I keep looking at that blade and I just can't imagine it was manufactured from indigenous steel, but I also can't imagine it was ever a European blade because I can't imagine how a European shaped blade was transformed into this. I think this is one of those blades that teaches you that you don't know nearly as much as you think you do. It probably makes perfect sense to a dha expert and all my assumptions and preconceptions are wrong.

I have one more blade on the way and I'm deeply embarrassed of it. I broke my "don't bid on things off your cell phone" rule, and when I took a closer look at it the next day the blade looked a lot like stainless steel and the rust on the scabbard looks quite recent. I'm afraid it's going to be a replica blade. Nobody bid against me so now it's mine. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised but I don't think so. Oh well. The sad thing is that I've had to pass on other much more desirable blades because I blew my wad on this stupid thing.


 
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