What To Do With Your Crappy Decorative Katana

REPOSTED FROM;thepostapoc.com

So, you’ve had that $40 flea market katana on your wall (next to your Cowboy Bebop poster) since you were fourteen, and you can’t bear to part with it? Either you haven’t read my machete article, or you’ve watched too much anime (or “Equilibrium“) and still believe you’d be able to Connor MacLeod your way through Humungus‘ hordes, deflecting bullets and looking really badass with your long coat and pewter jewelry blowing in the wind – despite your complete lack of training (cue epic Japanese theme song).

FEAR NOT, my pocky-scented friends – those cheap pieces of stamped steel shit aren’t completely worthless! In fact, while cheap steel is either too soft or too brittle to make effective long-blades, it’s usually sufficient for shorter utility blades. Brittle steel makes for good knives and slicing blades that will hold their edge and provide good hard tips for better penetration.  Softer, more flexible steels are better for medium-length chopping and hacking blades that will take more abuse without chipping or snapping, but will require frequent field-sharpening. In fact, the blade-heavy balance of your typical wall hanger actually improves the chopping capability of a medium-length blade, and becomes negligible in a knife-length blade.

To allow me to demonstrate how to cheaply and easily modify your wall hangers for field use, my webmaster has donated the following set of carnival-quality blades: a katana, wakizashi, and tanto.

First, you’ll want to strip the weapons of all the shiny, sparkly bullshit that’s been glued all over them.

Sometimes the scabbards are made of wood and can be salvaged, but these were made of a very brittle black PVC, and cracked as I was peeling the adhesive-coated fabric off, so I tossed them.

The tsubas (hilts) and pommel caps are made of gold-colored plastic, so I pulled them off and tossed them as well.  As you can see, the handles are pine, covered in the same adhesive-backed fabric and wrapped in a shoestring from the early 90s.  I swear they must’ve worn out a hot glue gun on these things. Beneath the pommel cap you can see the nut that is the tell-tale sign of a rat-tail tang (or hidden tang).

The tang is the portion of the blade that extends into the handle itself. High quality full tangs are generally the same thickness as the blades and exhibit no seams or welds where the tang transitions into the blade. Rat tail tangs, however, are long bolts welded to the base of a blade, extending through a hollow handle, and fastened at the pommel end with a nut. This allows the blade to twist in relation to the handle, and unless the hollow portion inside the handle fits the bolt tightly, the bolt will rattle inside the handle. All of this, combined with the blade-heavy balance, can cause the weapon to fracture at the weld between the blade and the tang.

These tangs definitely didn’t fit tightly inside the handle. Below are the only components I salvaged. One of the handles was actually made of a good hardwood, so I left that one bare, but the two pine handles had to be covered.

In order to keep the blade from twisting, I used a saw to cut a blade-width notch into the end of each handle into which the base of each blade would fit snugly.

To eliminate the rattling of the tang inside the handle, I filled the cavity around the bolt with epoxy, and then applied locktite to the nut and tightened it as much as I could by hand.

Because I set the blades into notches in the handles and discarded the pommel caps, the tang extended well beyond the bottom of the handle.

Two minutes with a hacksaw, and voila!

Next, I needed to wrap the handles. Sport grip tape works great, but I have a soft spot for paracord-wrapped handles. I cord wrap the same way my dad showed me when I was a kid (you can use this same method with any kind of twine or cordage you want). First, fold your cord over to form a loop, and tape that loop at one end of the handle.

At the other end, start wrapping the longer end of the cord as tightly as you can over the handle, and the two parallel cords running the length of the handle.

When you make it back to the loop, cut the cord, leaving just enough to pass through the loop.

Thread this end through the loop, a-like so…

Now go back to the other end, and you should have a free bit of cord just sitting there begging to be messed with.

Pull on the cord in the picture above (hard…you may need pliers) and you’ll see your loop at the other end get tighter and tighter until…

You can stop at this point if you’re using a synthetic cord, trim all your loose bits, and use a match or lighter to melt the frayed ends. Otherwise, you’ll need to keep pulling on the cord that you’ve BEEN pulling, until the loops pulls the other free end completely underneath the wrapping, thus securing it under itself.

Now trim off the excess, and you’re done.

At this point, I still had one blade (the katana) that was far too long and heavy for the quality of its steel, so I used a cutting wheel to shorten the blade to the length of the wakizashi. If you don’t have a cutting wheel, just use a hacksaw, and clean up the edges with a file.

Here they are with my Tomahawk brand waki from the machete article (for size comparison). As cheap as the Tomahawk waki is, it looks like a Masamune in this lineup.

So, these blades are more or less ready for use. Keep in mind, they are made of a low grade soft steel, and will require frequent field sharpening. I use a fine to medium grit file for this, and give them a tool edge, much like a machete. The sharper you make them, the quicker the blade will lose its edge. You can harden the blades by heating tempering them (heat to red hot in coals, and then quench in water), but at that point, you’re putting in far more work that you’ll ever get out of these blades, and you risk either fracturing them during the tempering process, or making them so brittle that they’ll snap the first time you hit something. Save yourself the time and go get a Cold Steel katana machete (when you check out, let them know in the “comments” portion that you were referred by thepostapoc.com).

Don’t get me wrong, any sharp piece of steel is lethal, and any blade can make a great brush clearing tool or trunk weapon. I usually give these blades away to otherwise unarmed friends and relatives. It gives me peace of mind to know that I haven’t left them completely empty handed, but also that I’m not giving them an expensive, high quality blade that’s going to gather dust in a dark corner of their closet. Either way, you’re taking that decorative sex-repellent off your wall and making something useful and practical that your friends can’t make fun of you behind your back for (as easily)… but no one said you can’t still dress it up a little.

As you can see, I put a little work into the aesthetics of my bottom-shelf blades. I’ll have you know, though, that I didn’t spend a single penny anywhere in this entire project. Every material and tool I used was found in my house or my garage, with no exceptions.

For the black blade, I first put painter’s tape on the blade and used an exacto knife to cut out the design, then peeled the tape around the design off. I then spray painted the entire handle (sans cord wrap) and blade with two coats of flat black. Spray paint is actually good for cheap steel weapons, as it protects them from rust and can be reapplied after use. The paint on the edge is removed easily during sharpening, as is the rust that may form on the exposed edge. After painting, I peeled the painter’s tape off so that the bare steel could be seen, and then covered the entire blade in two layers of clear coat.

The bare steel blade came out beautifully. I sanded the hardwood handle smooth and oiled it with orange oil, then sprayed it with two layers of clear coat. The pommel is actually the end cap from another scabbard that I kept from a previous wall hanger which got cut up into knives years ago. I spray painted the pommel with copper Rustoleum, sanded the end of the handle until it fit tightly onto it, and epoxied it into place. I used painter’s tape and the same copper paint to create a faux habaki (blade collar), and then covered that with clear coat.

“What about the tanto,” you ask? I decided to go all out with the tanto, and made it into the world’s most dangerous business card:

I used the same painter’s tape technique to do the lettering, but spray painted the blade with a base coat of flat black, dusted with copper Rustoleum. I created another faux habaki, and spray painted the handle glossy black with copper on each end. I experimented a bit to create a permanent pommel: I wrapped painter’s tape around the pommel-end such that the tape extended just past the end of the nut. I then filled that cavity, like a cup, with epoxy. Twenty-four hours later, the epoxy had hardened throughout. I filed off the hard edges, and painted my new pommel copper.

The sheath for the tanto was cut from the same aforementioned scabbard that I salvaged the bare-steel waki’s pommel cap from. I sprayed the whole thing copper, and then wrapped most of it with white nylon twine using the same technique with which I wrapped the handles. I had a tiny bit of synthetic sinew left from a deer-antler handled knife I made last christmas, as well as a single tiny shed-antler, so I affixed both of them to the sheath. I then wrapped some spare copper wire around it – seriously, I was using whatever I found lying around my work bench. Lastly, as a decorative signature piece, I epoxied on an old depression-era Oklahoma State income tax token from my coin collection.

What you can’t see is the belt loop on the back of the sheath. I made it by cutting a four or five inch section of black suede belt leather, and wrapping one end tightly under the white twine. The other end is wrapped tightly under the copper wire. Both ends are held in place with epoxy.

And that, my friends, is what you do with your shitty decorative katana – strip off the bullshit, shorten it, and reinforce the handle. I also just needed a good distraction while trying to sit through some of the so-called films I’m writing up reviews for. Take before and after photos of your own wall-hanger modification projects and send them to me at thepostapoc[at]live.com.