The year has not started on the most positive note I am saddened to say.

We are all poorer for the loss of one of the true early visionaries of the sword industry, Mr. Fernando De Guzman Snr, who passed away Sunday morning at 4am local time.

Mr De Guzman Senior was truly ahead of his time, using traditional Filipino sword making techniques as his base and expanding out to experiment and perfect forging first Japanese and then medieval swords, including many that are currently in the hands of some well known celebrities and/or their estates.

When everyone was marveling at the Katana made by Kris Cutlery back in the day, it was the firm influence and even direct work of this master artisan - and it is with great sadness that I highlight the following brief video I took during my trip to see the forge only a few short years back, a video made at the request of his son, Hernando, showing one of Mr De Guzman Snrs unique tempering methods to create a differentially hardened blade using nothing other than many years of experience and impeccable timing.

It was an honor to have met you sir - rest in peace Mr De Guzman.

January also saw quite a few changes going on everywhere, with some old hands moving on and in our case, one of our friends and exceptional blade maker, Master Michael Ye who has moved on due to ongoing difficulties impacting the sword industry in Longquan.

He did a lot of great work with us, and was even involved making the bare blades for our collaboration with US based artisan, Jeffrey J Robinson making the classic Seraph Aegis for the Legendary Swords Project.

And then there is the general chaos of an industry forced to deal with sever supply line problems - restocks taking many, many months more than usual, saya shortages (the great saya famine of 2020) and oh so many headaches..

No one ever really gets involved in THIS crazy industry for the money, that is for sure...

While stocks are running low for many suppliers all over the world, and things ARE rather confusing to monitor due to the pace the situation changes and unfolds, OVERALL the industry is actually in fairly good shape thanks to the uptake in online ordering over 2020 generally. But it is taking some time to properly find its footing as demand begins to outstrip supply - and no matter what happens - it looks like 2021 will be a very active and interesting year.

Get a further 10% off our already heavily discounted 13th century 65mn spring steel arming sword in both standard and folded steel patterning using the coupon code 'DIGEST' (or simply click on the coupon to automatically apply the discount to any arming swords added to your cart).

Offer expires midnight EST 5th of February 2021 and while stock lasts.

32 year old Isaac Ramirez Vargas whose ancestors were Aztec himself, manufacturers fully functional replicas of these terrifying Obsidian toothed 'swords' and 'axes'. Find out more about their history and what Issac is up to in this fascinating article.

Apparently the wearing of swords led to gender specific buttoning - men tended to be right handed and wear swords on their left side. So to unbutton a jacket, it made sense to have the buttons on the right hand side if it was necessary to quickly get it out of the way for a good old fashioned sword fight!

Here is one for fellow hard core geeks - you may have seen 'the Governator', Arnie recently take to the airwaves with Conan Sword in hand to express his distaste of the recent capitol riots. But a few days ago, the most important geek related question was finally asked - if Conan the Barbarian was in D&D, what character class is he?

Stolen as a 'prank', apparently guilt plagued the young at the time man who stole away the massive bronze recreation of a civil war sword in the early 1980s the whole time - and 40 years after it was taken, he returns it and all is forgiven.

It appears we may need to re-think exactly how early interactions between the Middle Kingdom and the England may have occurred, at least that is what the recent find of some 11th century Chinese coins unearthed in the U.K. for the second time in three years.

While Kendo is definitely a sport rather than a true 'martial art' like Kenjutsu - it began to develop several hundred years ago from Kenjutsu as a way to spar at full speed and with full power without killing your training partner (they tended to run out of volunteers after cracking a few skulls with Bokken) - and if you watch it closely, you can see that it is about as close to a real swordfight as possible without the bloodshed (though that said, even with the armor, a solid blow HURTS - but it does not leave terrible bruises and the Bamboo Shinai is flexible enough to avoid the kind of injuries that can result training using wooden swords).

Kendo is practiced by over 1 million people, from students in high schools and colleges to members of the Japanese Diet and even a Prime Minister who was a 6th Dan Blackbelt.. This video from Japan shows the speed and technique in slow motion and is extremely interesting to watch, especially if you visualize what would have happened in a given exchange had the blades been real..

Amazing speed and reaction time - while it may be just a sport, any modern day swordsman with an open mind can learn a great deal from it.

So far so good - our idea to send out some FREE swords in exchange for an unbiased review is working well. Still room for more entries if you are interested, and don't think post count is the be all and end all. The most recent winner had only 4 posts at the time!

An interesting discussion about why many medieval swords had brown leather and a historical dive into what colors meant to various social groups and the elites from Roman times to the medieval period.

Almost every medieval sword these days comes with a scabbard. But for those high end blade, many do not - and the cost of a good scabbard can be from $800 to $2500 or more.. So it is worth it? What goes into making a good scabbard? Find out here.

Can you safely use a folded blade to cut bamboo? In this discussion SBG forumites discuss the ins and outs of both folded blades and the target, bamboo. Interesting and important discussion, because some folded blades are indeed like ticking time bombs..

If you are a regular digest reader, you will know that it has been nearly 8 months since we last took an order for the Forge Direct Custom Katana.

While it took a few months to sink in, the effects of Covid-19 on the sword industry in Longquan where these (and indeed most) swords are made were devastating. The sword industry had been in steady decline for several year now - but the pandemic caused utter chaos to hit the sword component supply chain especially hard. Specifically one particular component - saya (the scabbards).

Previously, we were able to offer a very wide variety of saya styles in various lengths without any major issues - some featuring some really stunning hand painted artwork.

But sometime after June 2020, almost all of these artisans had moved on. But it was not just these ornate aya that have been effected. Almost every style is no longer readily available, and to stand any chance of being able to offer these swords again, dramatic changes had to be made..

This is not the first time that the Forge Direct Custom Katana has been revised. Indeed, the version offered until the June shutdown was the third incarnation of this product, version 3.0. But the change from 3.0 to 4.0 will be quite dramatic a we do two things simultaneously: that is to say we will be IMPROVING the base quality while STREAMLINING the customization options.

Improvements include:

But the streamlining means that several options had to go because now, we have to pre-purchase a minimum of 10 saya of each style.. And previously, with 4 different blade lengths to choose from men that to bring back EVERY saya in every size would require a starting order of 1,400 PREMIUM saya up front! (35 styles, 4 lengths and minimum of 10pcs per style per order).

Clearly that is not a very workable plan.

So what we did is we went over each and every Custom Katana order ever placed, and were rather surprised by the results..

Even with 4 different blade lengths, the vast majority of people selected a 28" blade - and while fittings selected varied wildly, for saya selections and for tsuka and rayskin colors, we identified that almost EVERY order could be remade using one of just 9 saya designs as many of the colors were NEVER selected..

Here are the 9 saya that almost everyone ordered (and I must admit, they are all very classy - the sword community have good taste!):

And it's the same with the ito colors - instead of 10 colors, we could narrow the selection down to 5 and still cover 95% of all orders ever placed..

So moving forward, with this information at hand, we began to try and plot a new course in these difficult circumstances. As such, over the next few weeks, we will be refining and streamlining the listing for the Forge Direct Custom Katana until both the listing, and the forge, are ready to go.

While it's true that this streamlining will make super specific designs impossible - in terms of build quality and the quality of the blades themselves, I honestly do not know of any other serious sword brand that can compete with these..

And indeed, having been involved with making Custom Katana for nearly 14 years now, the biggest takeaway lesson was to keep things simple and not make exceptions, as that is not how the big forges best operate - they prefer to make runs of the same model over and over, so minimizing the variations will end up with a better result for everyone.

Some of the smaller workshop style sword sellers can make quite specific designs if you catch them at the right time, constantly monitor the swords progress to catch errors early, and be prepared to roll the dice (especially if you request something one of these workshops has not made before, you effectively become their guinea pig!).

But for ACTUAL direct from a real sword forge blades, simpler is better and we can guarantee that what you ordered is what you will get when from the workshops I often hear of multiple errors and incorrect builds of questionable quality..

First of all, we have several weeks of downtime coming as the Forges, workshops and indeed the whole country shuts down for the Lunar New Year celebrations. It is often during this time that we would have a special sale on Forge Direct Chinese..

But not this year.

While we worked tirelessly from June to the present day to clear the backlog of orders, even now we have around half a dozen still outstanding - and quite a few that have been abandoned by their designers due to the excessive and unexpected wait time, giving us quite a bit of 'stock' that we would rather not have..

So stay tuned for a sale on these items - soon after, if all goes to plan, the Custom Katana version 4.0 will be released for the first time - hopefully by the end of March this year (we will order all the saya AND some blades in late February, and only once they are getting close to completion will we re-open on new orders, and keep on topping up our pool of components and blades as needed).

It's been an incredibly stressful time as we reduced a mountain of order into half a dozen or so. And if it was not for such positive feedback when the blades ARE finally received, I would have just wound it all up and called it a day. But I think we owe it to the sword community to continue this product. If you have ever owned one or have seen one in person, you will know what I am talking about..

Sort of..

If you are interested in being notified directly when the revamp process is complete, simply click on the link below to be taken to the product listing and look at the top of the page for this link:

Then you just enter your email and the second the listing is complete and ready to order you will get an email letting you know.

That about finishes this issue of the digest - lot's going on, so much so that it's been rather hard to keep on top of it all! But overall, things look positive - and we end this issue to briefly celebrate SBG's 16th birthday, born as it was on the 14th of February 2005.

So happy sweet 16th SBG!

Until next issue, stay strong, stay safe and happy swordening.