Happy New Year!

Hi everyone, hope you enjoyed the New Year celebrations and here’s to a happy and healthy year in 2012!

Quite a bit going on at the moment (and lots more in store for 2012!) but one immediately newsworthy thing..

CHENESS CUTLERY WAREHOUSE HOLIDAY

The Cheness warehouse will be closing down for a company holiday for three weeks over the Lunar New Year holiday period, so the last chance to get an order in and shipped is really either by today or Thursday at the absolute latest, with all orders coming in after this time shipping after the 1st of February. So if you want to get a Cheness sword before the warehouse closes, NOW is definitely the time to do so..!

That’s it for now, though stay tuned – there is a lot going on behind the scenes at the moment and 2012 will see several long term SBG projects that we have been planning come to fruition!

Talk to you all again soon.

– Paul

Lots of updates

Things have been SOOOO busy the last couple of weeks that while there has been a lot going on, I simply haven’t had time to update it all properly! But as there have been some very newsworthy things going on, an update is defintely due..!

First off, we are now completely out of stock on the Dojo Pro Katana – however even though it will be too late for anyone who wants one of these to give (or indeed receive) as a Christmas present, new stock plus all the new models mentioned in a previous blog update should land sometime around the 15th of December, and if you saw some of these models you’ll know we are all in for a treat..

Cheness Cutlery are also pretty low on stock at the moment, with only a handful of models in stock but their restock should be coming in towards the end of the month (again too late for Christmas darnit! Lol).

But with all this talk of Christmas, plus the fact that we have almost zero stock of anything at the moment (as you may know, the SBG custom Katana orders closed quite some time ago too) we decided to partner up with Hanwei again and offer a truly amazing deal on one of their recently discontinued Raptor models..

As this unique model has been discontinued in favor of more generic designs, this is indeed your LAST chance to own what is effectively the earliest style of ancient Katana – in time for Christmas and at an exceptional price. PLUS it is also available with Ricky Chen’s exclusive sharpening service for an additional $59.95 – taking it to a whole new level at a total price that is STILL well under what it normally sells for (plus free shipping, and a free DVD!).

Check it all out in our Hot specials section here

And for those of you who are interested in something a little more exclusive, along with batch 17 we also received a special order we placed with the forge for some SBG exclusive blades – the first one has leather ito, a rattan wrapped saya and solid bodied, T10 tool steel blade as below:

And the second one is FOLDED T10 tool steel with real hamon, bo-hi, copper fittings with real silver and gold plating, and a battle wrap tsuka as follows:

Both are available on the main page of the store and also listed in the SBG custom section (for obvious reasons) – but you can also read some more about them and see some larger pics over at the dedicated SBG Custom Katana blog (which of course also gives you the most up to date information how things are going with the forging of batch 18 and final deliveries of batch 17).

Still have quite a few emails to get around to so had better wrap this up. Post again soon..!

Paul Southren

Phew!

Well, the batching process for batch 18 took a little longer than expected..! The amount of correspondence was pretty hard to keep up with (I answer each and every email personally), but apart from a few emails which I am still trying to find the time to answer batch 18 is locked down, the forge have all the instructions and will start work within the next couple of days (there was also a lot of formatting work, cross checking and double checking to make sure that everything is exactly as specified).

Batch 17 is currently around 20% shipped, with another 50% about to update with a tracking number in the next 2-3 days and the last 30% should go out approx 1 week afterwards (rest assured, my agent and I are working overtime to make sure these go out ok).

At the same time we received with batch 17 a very special delivery of ready made swords from the forge. While the timing does indeed stretch our resources to the maximum, I had to get the main ones listed though batch 17 orders get priority shipping (which messes things up for offering these in time for Christmas, but my priority is on servicing EXISTING customers)..

Because of all that is going on at the moment I don’t have much time to post a lot about them here just yet, but they were previewed in the most recent edition of the Sword Buyers Digest so I’ll just add in a couple of quick large size pics (click for the full size pics) and give you the link if you are interested.




You can find both of these listed on the SBG Custom Katana page here

Sorry for the ultra rushed post, there is more going on behind the scenes than you can poke a sword shaped object at!

– Paul

The official GO signal!

Wow, what a weekend..

Even without the official launch, the response to our ‘unofficial’ opening has been nothing short of spectacular. I can clearly see the kind of pressure that builds up for these swords in between batches, and I must admit I always took a little bit excited when I start seeing people’s designs and corresponding with them about what they have in mind..

Anyway, the official launch is now underway – so please bear with me if you are waiting on an email response, I promise I am doing my best to stay on top of things, both with regards to enquiries to this batch, processing and confirming incoming orders and also coordinating the shipment of the previous batch (not to mention all the usual SBG stuff). So if you are waiting on something, rest assured a response is coming, it just might take a day or two longer than usual as I work through everything as systematically as possible.

Gotta go – I’ll be posting another update soon!

Click here to order

P.S. If you have been waiting to get an order in with this BATCH – NOW is definitely the time to do so. At this rate, we will be closing this batch off by the end of the week, so don’t miss out! Get your order in now..

Quick an unofficial update

Ok, just wanted to let people know where we are up to as the 18th has nearly been and gone and we haven’t given the official ‘go’ signal for batch 18..

First off, the previous batch (batch 17) has started being received by my agent in Canada and he is opening up the cartons and beginning the sorting and inspecting period over the weekend. People with batch 17 orders should be receiving an official update on this shortly, but right now I am having some kind of technical glitch and cannot log into the store to update the appropriate files which is a bit of a pain.

Unofficially though we have ‘taken the brakes off’ and we are NOW able to accept new custom Katana orders even though the official announcement has not gone out yet.

I am doing it this way to try to ensure there is not a massive rush and we end up closing off before people who have REALLY been waiting patiently for this (i.e. people reading this blog!) gets a fair chance to do so as they sell waaay to fast for their own good. So for those of you who just cant stand the waiting and anticipation any more and are dilligent enough to check this blog – well, you can get in as an early bird now (it DOESN’T effect how soon you will receive your sword by the way – they all get made as a single group remember. It just gets you a high prized place in the batch)..

To everyone who is waiting for a response via email, please bear with me – I’m answering them personally and my answers are rarely short ones.. I’ll get back to you as soon as humanly possible.

SBG Custom Katana

Thanks all,
– Paul