This is where you start. The habaki determines where and how all the other
parts go together. If this piece is sloppy or poorly made, the entire sword
will suffer.
For some reason I have been interested in how Japanese swords were made. I have been reading and researching and learned a great deal about the myths and realities of the swords. Since at the moment making a blade the traditional way is out of the question, I settled on trying out the second half of sword making... everything else.
A blade by itself is useless. You can't hold it, wield it, block with it, carry it, or do much else with it. It needs a handle. The handle needs fittings to locate it and keep it in place on a blade and a wrapping to hold it all together... but I am getting ahead of myself.
The sword has several parts, and each has a name. Actually, each probably has several names. The Japanese seem to have a unique name for almost every aspect of every part of a sword.
The first thing I need is a blade. Atlanta Cutlery sells raw katana blades. I picked the "modern" katana blade which is a slightly scaled up version of the traditional blade to match the slightly scaled up people that are walking around today. It is a high carbon steel blade made by Windlass Steelcrafts in India. Windlass is the company that makes many of the blades for Atlanta Cutlery's sister company Museum Replicas. Having handled blades from Museum Replicas before, I felt reasonably comfortable with the quality of blade I would likely be getting.
This is where you start. The habaki determines where and how all the other
parts go together. If this piece is sloppy or poorly made, the entire sword
will suffer.
The habaki was forged from a piece of 2 inch wide 3/16 thick copper bar. A section of bar was folded around the tang of the blade and carefully fitted. A thin copper wedge is cut and filed to fit in the notch of the blade, edge side. Once the wedge fits the blade profile, it is carefully fitted into the habaki and soldered in place (off the blade, so as to preserve the temper). If done properly the resulting habaki should slide onto the blade and seat firmly against the notches at the rear of the blade making contact with all parts of the blade. The "back" of the habaki, where the tsuba will fit must be filed flat and square or else the fit of the handle will be off.
The tsuba is made from a piece of 1/4 inch thick mild steel plate. It is 3 inches in diameter and carefully trimmed to fit over the tang of the blade. In my case I elected to leave the tsuba very plain. Ideally, this should be blued or finished with a black oxide patina, but for the sake of time, I painted mine.
The handle is made from two pieces of 1/2x2 poplar. It turns out that poplar is not that far off from the Japanese hardwood they would have used. I am sure if they had hickory or oak they would have used that, but I was going for traditional when I selected the wood.
Compared to everything else, this is probably the most challenging part. The wrapping literally holds everything together. Even though the handle is glued together and has the end caps helping it out, the majority of the strength comes from the wrap. Done correctly, the wrap binds the handle together, keeps the pommel on the handle, provides a non-slip grip, and won't unravel instantly if cut. Do it wrong and it is ugly, unstable, and just about useless.
The first layer of the wrapping is traditionally skin from the belly of a particular variety of ray. It has the properties of being textured without being too abrasive and more importantly, it is pliable while wet, but hardens when dry. The wood of the handle was wrapped with a piece of this wet skin and allowed to dry. The resulting form fitting sheath doesn't add much strength on its own, but when you add the over-wrap it keeps the two halves of the handle from shifting.
The second layer of wrap is traditionally a silk braid or cord that is
wrapped in one of any number of styles. The thing that the styles all have
in common is that the wrap crosses over itself such that each crossing binds
the other to the handle. Let me try again. The wrap is made from only one
piece of braid. The middle of the braid is placed on the side of the handle
up by the guard and each end wraps around the handle in opposite
directions. When the meet on the other side they must cross over each other
to continue. When they meet again on the other side, the end that stayed in
contact with the handle must now cross over the other braid. This
alternation continues all up the handle. If this does not happen, then one
end of the braid just spirals up the handle and the other end spirals over
it. At first glance everything looks fine except that the wrapping will
shift around and if it is cut, the whole thing just unwraps. If the wrap was
done properly, the wrap is less likely to shift because each braid is
pinned to the handle by the other braid every half turn. If this wrap were
cut, it would still unravel eventually, but the cut piece of braid could
only unwrap half a turn before the undamaged piece stopped it. Since the
undamaged piece can only unwrap if the damaged piece unwraps first and the
damaged piece can only unwrap if the undamaged piece unwraps, the unwrapping
is limited to one small segment until movement loosens the whole thing.
Basicly, it stops it from falling apart on the battle field. The first photo
shows one of my preliminary wraps and is wrong. The second photo shows the
correct wrap and the bamboo pin in place.
The wrap is more or less self securing except for the very end. There is a
special knot that holds the pommel on to the handle and prevents the wrap
from coming loose. Believe it or not, it isn't much of a knot as we are
used to them. There are a series of folds and tucks, but the integrity of
this knot depends upon the tag end being secured. The tag end is secured by
tucking it under that which it is securing. I had my doubts about this, but
when I had to use a smoothed bamboo peg and a mallet to drive the tag end
under the wrap those doubts faded.
I ran into some problems with the wrap. First of all, I couldn't locate any ray skin (big shock). I ended up going with plain old leather. It didn't have all the nifty properties the ray skin had, but since I used modern adhesives to hold the wood together instead of rice paste and I was unlikely to use this sword in combat, the added strength wasn't missed. The leather did give me enough friction to keep the wrap in place. My second problem was that I couldn't locate a suitable braid or cord. I wasn't even being picky about cotton, polyester, or silk but I couldn't find anything even close to what I wanted.. I finally gave up and bought 20 feet of 6mm rope and used the braid off of that. It was as close as I was going to find locally.
Wrapping is easy enough, but it took about three trial runs to get a feel for it before I made a real effort at it. You have to be careful to keep the spacing even and neat. The wrap has to be kept very tight the whole way though. There is no such thing as too tight. Clamps are your friend. Once you reach the end of the handle, clamp the ends, Tightly wrap the wrapping with another cord just in case and take a break. After you have recovered, tie the knot. This will take almost as long as wrapping the handle did. When it is all done, the handle is surprisingly strong, light, non-slip, and the wraps don't shift. The whole handle assembly can be installed on the sword and the bamboo peg fitted.
I am probably going to mangle this, but why stop now...
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