Cool! Yesterday I was bingeing pawn stars episodes where they bought old swords. Fascinating. A cool series based in Japan are the John Rain novels by Barry Eisler. Spy novels woven with Japanese samurai mythology
Decided to try my hand at building a watch. Parts sourced from eBay, etc. old stock Hamilton case, dial and hands with Chinese clone movement. Seems to run fine in the end, despite a few problems along the way