Last edited by robsterb; 11-12-2020 at 10:29 AM.
Hi everyone,
I would like to hear your thoughts on my Shin Gunto. I am not sure if it is a fake or not. Stamps look fine but the hilt seems to me like brass and I couldn't find any pic of original Shin Guntos with hilts of brass. What do you think?
Last edited by robsterb; 11-12-2020 at 10:29 AM.
I don't like it. Something is wrong. That's enough for me to stay away from it. The owner of this sword will always have a challenging job to convince him and/or others that it's not a fake. The air of fraud will always follow it.
I call it a fake.
The give away is the brass hilt, as a decent peruse here would have told you. Early examples have a copper hilt, later ones aluminium. You can get anodised aluminium which at first glance look to be brass, but only at first glance.
Copper is a high temperature melt metal, and expensive for a war time economy... I suspect, and would be interested in confirmation, that the copper hilts were stamped from sheet and then hard soldered together because of the problems with casting.
Why the Chinese fakers go for brass, god only knows, aluminium is cheaper and casts at a lower temperature, but hey, thankfully they do, and it makes them easy to identify.
Fake. The stamps on the fuchi are wrong and the kissaki is better than most fakes, but still wrong. These are getting better every year!
Interestingly, the launch documentation for the Type 95 sword specified "Brass" as material of the grip, NOT copper.
Definition of brass is when more than 20% of zinc is mixed into copper, while what we generally perceive as "yellow brass" has zinc content of 35%. Thus what collectors call copper Tsuka is probably actually brass with zinc content close to the lower limit of 20%, making it copper red instead of brass yellow.
So what the Chinese fakers do with the grip material may not totally be off the mark, but only wrong in the composition ratio of the alloy, containing too much zinc. 
What a shame unfortunately - anyway thank you a lot for your expertise!
That makes sense, because copper is not the best of metals to work with. The alloy you describe is what we would have called gilding metal when I was learning my silversmithing skills. Gilding metal - Wikipedia
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