Cheness 9260

I picked up a Cheness 9260 through hardened bare blade to use as a mounting project/learning experience.  When I got the blade I was a little surprised at the shape of it.  The nakago had a strange bullet point shape to it and the kissaki was very small and misshaped.  This is an older model, so I think there have been some changes to the shaping since then.  The blade itself is well made, the only other issue was the bo-hi had two different angles on either side of the nakago.  This wasn't too much of a big deal since it would be covered by the habaki and tsuka.  I made some preliminary alterations to the overall shape of the nakago with a grinder and belt sander and then switched to files to refine the shape and for fine tuning.  There is a major issue with the ha-machi and the mune-machi being offset.  I am not sure why Cheness shaped the blade this way, but it had to be corrected as well and evened up.

There was no habaki, so one was crafted from brass and welded together with silver solder.  A machigane was added to complete the piece.  It was fitted to the nakago and is nice and flush.  Here is a picture of it still in the VERY rough stage.  There is still a lot of shaping to do on the outside to make it look correct.

The other area that needed to be corrected was the kissaki.  There was some problems with this in the fact that there wasn't much room to adjust and create a proper shape.  The options were to make it into a shobu-zukuri style or o-kissaki.  I preferred the latter so it was shaped as an o-kissaki.  There is still plenty of work to do in the cleaning up of the lines and removing the scratches, but I am happy with the results so far.

After doing this work to the blade, I am very pleased with the overall shaping of the sword.  The curve matches into the nakago and the shape is much more traditional and the flow is a lot smoother.  There is still a lot of work to do to make this complete and ready to be mounted.

More To Come...