47MartialMan said:
For me, it has been a bit of (expensive) trial-and-error. I started buying swords on eBay six years ago, when I didn't know any better. I bought cheap stainless steel decorative swords, which I thought at the time were the real McCoy. I was rather proud of my collection of stainless steel junk - until I started posting on
Sword Forum a year and a half ago. There, I met fellow sword collectors and swordmakers - and I learned what constituted a "real sword". Since then, I upgraded my collection from stainless steel SLOs (sword shaped objects) to mostly Atrims and Hanwei pieces.
Get familiar with different swordmakers and production sword brands (like Cold Steel, Kris Cutlery, Paul Chen/Hanwei). I've even met a couple of swordmakers in real life, and handled some of their work. That has helped me to figure out what I like. I like many of
Angus Trim's work. He's one of the swordmakers I met in person. Nice guy. I own five of his European swords and have a Atrim katana on order.
Some good low-end production pieces (about $200 - 400): Windlass, MRL, Kris Cutlery, Cold Steel, Paul Chen/Hanwei (some models), Last Legend (some models)
Mid-range production pieces (about $500 - $1000, folded steel): Hanwei Bushido, Orchid, Tiger. Some Last Legend.
High-end semi-custom: Bugei, Liveblade.
Stay away from Rittersteel and Valiant Armory. Though their blades are "carbon steel", their construction is pretty poor. Not only that, their swords are also butt ugly, IMHO.
When looking for a sword on eBay, don't search for "battle-ready sword". You'll probably get a LOT of junk in return. Run a search of a
specific swordmaker or brand name (e.g., "Paul Chen katana", "Cold Steel katana", etc). Though Atrim swords rarely pop up on eBay, I have gotten lucky a couple times.
Watch out for
paartist86 on eBay. This seller uses a LOT of hype in his auctions, and uses the same pictures in every auction. He also uses buzz words like "jiagang", which really doesn't mean anything.
I hope this helps!
