Caring for Your Blade

Picture this: you save up your money for a high quality knife/sword/axe/whatever. You buy it and it’s even better than the pictures. You use it over and over. Then, one day, you look at the blade and it’s covered in specks. “What the…” You try rubbing them off, and they’re stuck. You try scratching them off, no good. “But, it has a sheath? I didn’t leave it outside or anything…”

Unfortunately, just the oils on your own skin are enough to rust a blade over a little bit of time. And rust, once it’s on, is very hard to remove. And depending on the blade, might cost just as much (if not more) to refurbish than the original cost of buying it (I’m speaking from experience…).

Just like taking care of a car, your blade will last you a lifetime with enough discipline in maintaining it. If you drive your car every day, never change its oil or tires, or ever refill the wiper fluid, one day it will cease to work properly.

Fortunately, maintaining a high quality blade is neither expensive nor time consuming. Our high quality blade oil is only $10, and it takes only about 5 minutes to clean your blade (depending on size). We use a highly refined, narrow cut, non-detergent mineral oil. It's a colorless, low-viscosity, water white lubricating oil that works with all blade materials (including every blade we sell on this site!).

Applying some of our oil, every time after using your blade, will keep rust from forming on the surface. On top of oiling it after every use, we also recommend (if you don’t already) purchasing a case (sheath) for your weapon that minimizes its exposure to the elements.

And it’s that easy! Don’t be like me and buy a ~$600 Katana, only to be lazy, not clean it after using it, and having 1/3 of the blade completely rusted. To have the blade professionally refurbished (because you can’t simply sand it down) would have cost around $400. Meanwhile, if I had just taken the extra 5 minutes to clean it, I could have avoided that costly (and unnecessary) expense.