I bought one about 3 years ago when they first came out. It is a veyr well made item, with a hardwood hilt and bronze fittings. The blade is on mine is, aas usual for Paul Chen at that time, a hunk of railroad track forged into a blade and it is quite durable. It takes a good edge, holds it reasonably well, and may be touched up fairly easily. I use a Carborundum scythe stone on mine as it is essentially a living-history item and not a collector's piece. The one problem is the sheath. The angle at which it is hung allows the blade to slide out all too easily if you should lean over or be running. There are various field modifications that you can make; I took some leather lacing and laced uo the flaps that you see covering the hilt so that they give the seax more retention in the sheath. you could also extend the lower loop to hang the sheath at more of an angle to your belt. But there is an third alternative: my friend, Bruce Blackistone, Captain Atli of the Longship Company, comments that he has seen only a very few artistic representations of seaxes being worn and ALL of them show the individual sitting down with the seax across his lap. It occurs to him that this is not proof that they were carried that way, as a long blade is frequently laid across the lap when sitting, even when hung perpendicularly at one's side. So, he asks, did they really carry the longer seaxes, such as the Paul Chen model, hanging down at their sides rather than at this shallow angle that allows them to slide out all too easily?
BTW, archaeologists call the spear point shape of the Chen model the Frankish-style Seax, although they have been found all over Northern Europe. It is historically valid. My problem with the HI seaxes is that they are not, in that the hilts on them are shaped in ways that no seax ever discovered has had a hilt shaped and in that they have scales rivetted on to the tang, another thing not seen on any of the historical finds.
