December 3, 2012
November 13, 2012
- New Arrival: Japanese maple katana, Flame katana, Musashi iaito, Korean silver haidong jingum, dragon jingum, and a bunch of aluminum kagums!!!
- MAS currently has about 10 stock model L6 katanas that were made during the transition, and have some imperfections on the mounting. The typical problem is that the same’ (stingray skin) on the handle is not punctured on both sides (thus, it is difficult to remove mekugi pins). On some swords, the centre holes on tsuba and seppa are slightly bigger than the nakago (sword handle) that they could be slightly loose (may shift sideways about a millimeter). We are selling these katanas at 30% discount from their retail prices. In other words, the mounting cost (fittings, saya, etc) is FREE on these katanas. You can find the link of these sale katanas below. Please email us for more pictures.
August 22, 2012
Dear MAS customers:
It has been almost a year since our previous master smith retired due to his motorcycle accident related injury. As you all know, we temporarily closed the forge and disbanded our team of craftsmen for a few months in 2011. Since then, the new master smith, Mr. Wang S. Kim, has agreed to join our company and we have successfully transitioned to a new forge. Mr. Kim is a renounced artist who received an award in the Korean National Traditional Craftsmanship Competition (annually organized by Korean Association for Preservation of Important Intangible Cultural Properties).
We had a few hiccups while transitioning to a new forge.
- First, our team size has shrunk by half so that our production time has increased by ~2 weeks.
- The master smith had to adjust to the new system of semi-custom production (i.e. instead of making a few full custom swords per year, now he has to make ~10 semi-custom swords per month). There were some less-than-perfectly finished products and we took corrective actions.
- Our previous courier TNT Express was sold to UPS, and the shipping became a nightmare.
- Email server had problems and we were out of communication with customers for about a month.
- The website was down several times due to system instabilities (our website was built in 2003 and had some technical glitches).
We apologize to our customers who have experienced communication related frustrations and shipping delays. These problems are now fully behind us, and we have since:
- Implemented ISO9001:2008 style quality control.
- Started using FedEx for shipping.
- Upgraded the servers and website programs.
- We increased the number of fitting choices significantly.
The MAS team is looking forward to providing top quality products to our customers again, with better service now.
Thank you for your patience while we have been transitioning.
July 28, 2012
- While we were away on a business trip to Korea, we had some problem with the hosting server and the website was down for about a week. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused to our customers.
June 27, 2012
- We are going to our forge in Korea to implement some of the latest engineering quality control procedures. There won't be any shipping from June 28 - July 22. You can still place custom sword orders and we will process them right away. Any in-stock item purchases will be shipped on July 23 or July 24.
June 16, 2012
- E-Mail Problems!!!! We realized today that we have not been receiving email as much in the past 2 weeks. What happened is that our email server reached its maximum capacity of 30,000. (We have got used to Google that we completely forgot that there are maximum # of emails you can have on the server). So...if you have not received any email replies from us in the past 2 weeks or so....we are really sorry. Those are lost for good =(. Please re-send them to us.
April 7, 2012
- Several aluminum kagums are finally in stock. We expect to have all models to be available by mid-May. Please check the kagum section to see which models are available for immediate shipping.
- New In-stock Katana Model: Kame (turtle) katana is available now.
- Custom sword order progress update: All custom sword orders placed between November-February are expected to be completed by April 13th. Then, the swords will be shipped to our Canadian office for the final inspection, and they will be shipped to the customers on around April 20th. MAS staffs would like to thank all our customers for their patience while we were bringing our production speed back to the normal level.
March 27, 2012
- Due to high order volume, we are currently working with 12~15 weeks delivery schedule. We apologize for the delay. When we return to production at the end of last year, we had overwhelming response with new swords while our manufacturing capacity was reduced. We expect to return to the normal delivery schedule of ~10 weeks within a couple of months.
- We made a Maple katana but the saya colour is little bit off. Instead of trying to correct it during this busy time, we are simply offering it at reduced price. Please check our sales item section.
January 19, 2012
- We have several swords on sale. Some of them are made by our last head smith, Mr. Park, and some of them are made by ou new head smith, Mr. Kim. Please check the sales item section.
- We are currently making changes to the custom sword section. Please hang on to your orders while we complete the modifications. We will be offering a lot more fitting options than before.
