Spiral, thanks for offering a lot of helpful points and advice as well. You said, "in some way unused modern arms are more difficult to judge." That, with your input on Gurkha style testing brought me to another question: Part of what I value in what I collect is that it be usable. I'll post more on that below, but presuming I want to buy a modern piece, made by a local smith somewhere like Central Asia, Taiwan or the Philippines, and I want to ensure it's genuinely usable, but it happens to be a beautiful cultural piece with beautiful, hand crafted traditional embellishments on the handle and/or blade, what would you recommend? This is actually a common scenario for me, since I place high value on both of these areas.
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