Category Archives: SBG Custom Katana

It’s back from the brink of extinction after 5 years of continuous production – the SBG Custom Katana has been reborn!

The biggest problem we encountered over the last 5 years was the ‘fiddly bits’. Now true enough, a custom made Katana is a very personal thing, so ‘fiddly bits’ come with the territory to some degree. But as we were the first and the only company to bunch a whole heap of orders together under one umbrella and STOP TAKING ORDERS until these were completed and shipped from the forge, the more basic the options chosen, the better. And most people DID pick from the basic options, and got GREAT swords that they still talk about today!

The problem swords were almost always the ones with minor deviations from the standard, i.e. a 12″ tsuka instead of 11″, an engraving in English (which if done wrong, meant we had to throw the whole thing away and start again) and because we offered a wide range of alloy tsuba, there were some delicate designs in there – and delicate designs should really be made of iron, brass, hardened copper or steel..

In short, after the last batches have been delayed by these kind of things and the error rate shot up due to the number of possible combinations we were offering, and the costs kept going up but we never passed them on – we were at one point quite recently ready to throw in the towel, wrap it all up and call it a day..

But tempting as that might be, we knew that there were still people out there who would be more than satisfied with one of our best made swords. The forge does GREAT work, how they managed to handle all those possible combinations is beyond me.. (I’m not all that good at maths, but the combinations seem to be in the billions!) – and their blades, well it was their blades that got me interested in them in the first place..

So instead, I went back to the drawing board.

And came up with this..

The number of combinations now are enough to satisfy the vast majority of people, but deliver a more consistent, better product. Everything has been upgraded – the alloy fittings are entirely gone, instead we have been able to get a reliable supply of solid IRON tsuba in a number of excellent configurations (i.e. Classic Mokko, C Ring Musashi, Crane, Kuramono – heck, even one of the one used on the original Kanbai Katana!) and match them with some basic iron fuchi and kashira.

But we go one better, because for one flat price if you want something a bit more ornate you can upgrade for free to a pre-matched themed ornate brass set. I hand picked these for their uniqueness and availability – classic designs like the Torakami and Tsunami to some VERY unique themed sets that are just begging to be put on a one off, unique sword design combination..

Here’s some of my favorites..

Take the Tsunami design, give it a blue saya and blue ito with a solid bodied blade 27″ blade and there is one design straight out. Or mount the Bunka set on classic black ito with white rayskin, a 28″ blade with bo-hi and you have a super traditional looking blade. Or how about a classic ‘Torakami’ recreation as a Daisho set, or a black hobgoblin with red saya and folded steel…

You get the idea.. And that’s just a sampling of the offerings!

I’m excited in that I think we have come up with the ultimate evolution of this line – the only drawback is, to do all this we had to raise the price by a fair bit..

We have been selling these swords below cost for a long while.. Our attempts to perfect the kissaki and the itomaki had already increased the price, now we were offering proper bo-hi termination, solid iron or exotic, premium grade gold and silver plated sets – something had to give, so we had no choice but the raise the price to $499.99 shipped (free in Canada).

Now honestly, while this is a jump, it has to be done – we can’t keep the project going if it keeps running at a total loss every time. And when you consider now what you are getting, $499 is still a total bargain! ($499 is still VERY tight for what we are offering!).

Anyway, I am now in the final stages of preparing the product listing itself, adding in all the options and getting it ready for the April 22 relaunch.

But the good news is – it is happening. And I realize that the streamlining may upset some, but we need to it for the others that we KNOW we can delight, and keep this unique product alive on the market for those who want to make a unique sword that fits their taste and personality.

Like the 29″ bo-hi Bunka set with white ito, black rayskin and black saya. Or an all Black steel, black iron solid bodied 28″ Mokko with Burgundy Saya and rayskin saya wrap..

Yes, it’s coming back. And I’m very excited – I’ll have all the options and designs ready for the 22nd, so stay tuned folks.. If I could have done it all over again THIS is how I would have done it for sure..!

– Paul

Thanks to everyone who emailed me their words of encouragement about continuing the SBG Custom Katana series. Batch 21 is not quite all shipped out yet – the majority of the swords have come in and been accounted for, but we still have some stragglers that are due to hit customs this week, so we will be working to get these in and out to their owners as soon as possible.

Anyway, during this period we have been talking with the forge – trying to determine how to reduce the recent spike in the error rate (we used to have an error rate of around 3-5% per batch. When we added all the new options, the first time around it jumped slightly but was manageable. But batch 21 has had an error rate of around 10%, which is totally unacceptable and causes massive delays to correct it).

As mentioned in the previous post, we were looking at 3 options:

1) Raise the prices significantly and reduce the number of orders per batch.

2) Refine the concept, offering less but better options with a small to moderate price increase.

3) Call it a day.

From all the emails of support I received, option 3 is looking less likely. I want to keep offering this line, but I need to find a way to make it work better and to improve it substantially.

Option 1 is tempting – but it’s too elitist for my taste. So that leaves us with option 2..

To this end, I had been talking with the forge about how we can refine the custom Katana to reduce the error rate, improve the quality – without a massive price increase for a base model custom Katana (though there will HAVE to be a price increase to factor in previous cost increases that we did not pass on and the additional cost of better quality components).

Anyway, I think we might be getting somewhere..

Here is what it is looking like:

• 3 blade lengths, 27, 28 and 29″. All standard Shinogi Zukuri.
• Bo-hi (improved) or no hi. 
• Limited selection of IRON tsuba and iron fuchi/kashira
• Limited selection of brass or copper themed sets
• Current selection of ito colors
• Current 12 selection of saya colors
• Limited number of optional upgrades

To explain this a bit further, because our forge is a very small one it did not have access to all of the components used by other sword makers on the market. We were initially limited to a handful of brass tsuba, 7 iron tsuba – but a large assortment of basic alloy tsuba and fuchi/kashira.

But in the recent negotiations with the forge, we have managed to secure a decent selection of IRON tsuba with iron Fuchi Kashira and I’ve been playing around with how to make it work..

Here’s an example of 6 of the 31 possible iron tsuba we have been able to secure.

Combine this with 3 selected premium upgrades (rayskin on the saya, folding and leather wrap with hishigami) and I think we may have a valid custom Katana that is actually better than the original custom Katana series.

The error rate should come way down again and the price increase, while it will happen, will not be a jump of $160 or so.

I should also mention that the bo-hi option will be a proper bo-hi with correct termination at the kissaki as pictured below.

If we were to proceed with this, I think that we may be able to not only continue the project, but give it a whole new lease on life. But due to the need to avoid errors and cut down the production time, we will not accept any customizations that fall outside of the options we have chosen. It just messes up the whole thing, confuses the forge and upsets the end customer when something goes wrong.

Now like I said, this is all in the early stages – and I cannot guarantee that we will be able to pull it off. Indeed, in many ways it is a return to the basics – but with the experience of several years behind us, numerous refinements to the base product (such as really nice kissaki, alternating ito, etc) I think that if we are to continue, this will be the shape of things to come..

In the meantime, it’s back to bringing in the last of batch 21 and tying up the loose ends. But once this is done, maybe this is the fresh start the project needs..

I’ll keep you posted.

– Paul

Hi everyone,

It’s been a while between posts, primarily because we have been busy concentrating on some stragglers from batch 19 and ensuring that batch 20 goes along as smoothly as possible.

I won’t try to pretend that the last 2-3 batches have not been difficult. Customs gave us a very hard time due to the increased size of our shipments. And the forge slipped up on batch 19 with many more mistakes than usual when putting together everyone’s orders (naturally with a project like this, there will be one or two swords made to the wrong specs or with the wrong fittings in each batch. But this time, because batch 19 was larger than usual due to the projects increased popularity – the error rate shot up, and we are now working feverishly to fix anything that has been incorrectly made).

Anyway, despite all this we are getting everything back on track – batch 20 is completed on time and preparing to ship from the forge as we speak, though sadly we are expecting customs delays again like the previous batch (everyone has been forewarned that around 50% of all orders go out fast, and the others we have to fight tooth and nail for customs to dribble them out a few swords at a time until they all clear)..

So because of this, the much anticipated batch 21 is going to be much smaller and tighter than previous batches, we will only hold it open for a few days at the most and once we fill up, that’s it. This way we can keep the shipments size down so that customs does not cause us such a headache (as part of the issue is, a large shipment with so many different swords and so many different prices combined with the nature of the product, makes them especially stubborn and slow to process) – but also just tighten things up at the forge.

I’ll be posting again in a few days when we will open up on batch 21 – so if you are waiting, please bear with us just a little longer – we don’t like to have the forge twiddling their thumbs for long in between batches, but they need to remake a few swords from batch 19 as top priority, so once these are done we will open up again.

In the meantime, here’s a few pics of some of the swords from the most recently completed batch 20 which are right now being packed up to go to my agent in Canada for inspection and reshipping.

Wearing ‘socks’ to protect the sayas.

Some of the different tsuka combinations

A Chokuto and a battlewrap

Also, before I sign off – a couple more changes to this batch. First up, since the beginning we have been working hard to improve a part of the blade that is often neglected in production swords – the kissaki (tip).

The reason it is often ugly is because it is VERY intensive to polish, almost as time consuming as the rest of the blade – so to keep costs down most swords at around $300 forgo a refined polish and just do it rough. But even though it hurt us financially, we spent extra money on each and every sword to give it a real yokote and a decent polish, but there was still an area that looked scratchy.

But this recent photo of a random sword from batch 20 compared to an older sword shows that we are getting pretty close to our goal of a good polish on both the blade and the tip.

The old and the new polish side by side. As you can see, the new polish is highly reflective.

 The next change is also a positive one, but unfortunately not one that we can absorb the price increase on – and that is the optional extra leather ito upgrade, which is now done by only the most experienced cutlers using the much slower, but much more even and nicely wrapped, Hishigami process.

The jump from $25 to $60 is a big one, but as you can see the end result is much better and we would rather scrap the option than have it less than impressive.

Top, the new wrap – bottom – the old.

Top, new wrap with Hishigami.

Ok, that is enough for now I think! There are a mountain of emails and inquiries to go through (as mentioned elsewhere, I prefer to only answer inquiries for new orders as a batch gets closer to opening up because each batch is slightly different) – and we need to oversee batch 20 going out and get any issues from 19 cleared up as top priority. But once I am satisfied, I’ll make one more post to let you all know and then open on 21.

Talk to you all again soon.

– Paul