Tamahagane blades

Tamahagane, which in Japanese literally means "jewel steel" or "precious steel", is a type of steel made in the Japanese traditional way. Tamahagane is made by smelting iron sand in a clay furnace called "tatara" and mixing it with charcoal to produce steel with various carbon content. This very laborious process takes as much as 3 days. After the smelting process, the tatara is broken and the steel bloom or "kera" is broken and swordsmiths segregate and collect the steels with various carbon contents.

Making a blade from tamahagane requires high level of expertise from the swordsmith. Swordsmiths will laminate the different types of steel collected from the kera to create a sword which has a hard edge, soft core and springy sides.

Ryan858 is a katana with a blade made of Chinese tamahagane. The blade of this sword is hazuya-jizuya polished to bring out the beauty of the blade. It takes a polisher several weeks to do the entire polishing process. The blade has choji hamon, hadori polish is done to make the hamon stand out against surrounding areas. The tsuka is made of hardwood, fully wrapped with one-piece genuine rayskin and leather ito. The tsuba, fuchi and kashira are made of iron. The saya is made of hardwood and wrapped with bamboo. Koiguchi, kurikata and kojiri are polished buffalo horns. The sword is fully customizable.