Rescue a tanto blade with doubtful signature and doubtful polishing
One of our friends found a tanto blade at a cheap antique market. It had a signature "Sukefusa" in the tang. Of course, it is not the famous smith Sukefusa of Ichimonji. But our friend was fascinated with the blade. Apart from the signature, the polishing also is very doubtful for our eye. So, we bought it from him to resolve the doubt. We decided to re-polish it in honest way. We are going to report the works here.
The steel layer looks normal.
Is this hamon?
We have had kokaji to polish some part of the blade to check the real hamon. Actually it has some hamon. It is made of large particles (nie), but weak. Our conclusion is, the hamon-like white pattern in this polishing is a kind of fake. But we can't find out how the fake hamon was created.
On the half way of the shaping work with the rough stones, we found a fatal flaw. It was a tempering crack in hamon at the part of turn back around the tip. So we had to completely reshape it grinding off the tempering crack. And we also crashed the fake signature. Then, the blade will be reborn to an unsigned blade with honest polishing.
Silver foiled habaki is made out.
Under polishing in sashikomi style