This following professional assessment of the hamon is provided to us by Christopher Lau:

"The first thing I can see is that it is not traditionally polished; in fact this looks like the sandpaper and acid-etch finish used by Bugei and Slobodian, et al.

The narrow habuchi (the dark fuzzy line; it's dark because it's etched, a properly polished blade should show a very white line and white edge) indicates quite a high carbon content (in general, the wider the line, the lower the carbon - 0.6% carbon is about optimal - tough sword and also lots of activity).

The temper line is not as smooth as it could be and looks rather forced and unnatural, it is also has no ashi or other activity in the yakiba, so there's really nothing to look at - if nothing else, using a lower carbon steel would have widened this line and helped hide any imperfections. The transition between the point (kissaki) and the rest of the blade also doesn't seem to be very well executed- the point gives an impression of bluntness.

I think to make this sword look really good, the first order of business would be to reshape the point and then give it a traditional polish, and also kesho the edge to hide the fact that there's no activity whatsoever.

Following that, perhaps tempering the sword at about 250F in your oven might be warranted to relieve the brittleness in the edge - RC 60 is quite hard and combined with the extremely soft back, I would worry about the durability of this blade. All in all though, it still looks much better than any replica sword out there and for the price, I don't think you could go wrong with it."

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