I think the traditional oil (choji) used to maintain japanese swords contains clove oil.

i believe that the japanese have been using it to scent the oil they use on their daisho for a few centuries without ill effect. they use a few drops in mineral oil i think...

i bought a nice jar of coconut oil from boots (the chemist (pharmacy)) here a couple of years ago, still not rancid, i've used it on a few knives with reasonable results. where appropriate i use ballistol, which is a german developed general purpose cleaner/lubricant/protectant oil (mineral oil based) for guns, knives, and leather which has a pleasant scent, a bit like anise, but it does not keep the scent long. i don't use it on my malay/indonesian pamor blades though.

i recieved a couple of small bottles of keris oil along with my latest badek, when that runs out i'll get some essential oills from the bodyshop here & mix up some with the coconut oil....

The last bottle of sword oil I got out of Japan is identified as Clove Oil (it is the only English written on the bottle). It sure do smell like clove oil!

Japanese swords are real "finicky" as to what kind of oil you can put on them... some “everyday” machine oils can turn the blade dark - a disaster on an expensive Samurai blade (as well as... at over $100 per inch to re-polish plus shipping, and so on... you want to use the right stuff). Mineral oil is the oil of choice (on Japanese blades)... when lacking all others. But it does not have any odor. :(

I just wandered into this forum from Alan Maisey's page with whom I've done business for at least the last 15 years. I'm not quite as avid of a collector as I once was, but I am still greatly fascinated by ethnographic weaponry.

This is the only source of kenanga oil I've been able to find:
http://libertynatural.com/index.html They sell Cananga Odorata forma Macrophylla which, as far as I can discover, is the ylang-ylang subspecies known as kenanga oil. I did quite a bit of research on this topic while trying to copy Alan's keris oil recipe which primarily uses sandalwood and kenanga oil. I've never been completely satisfied with my results, however. I've purchased the kenanga oil from Liberty Natural and it is still very sweet. I"m not sure that I would be able to tell the difference between it and ylang-ylang (which I guess is not too surprising considering their extremely close kinship). I use very little of it and end up using mostly sandalwood oil. Because the kenanga oil is considered an inferior oil to the ylang-ylang, it is fortunately, quite inexpensive.

Hope that helps!

Thanks Lang, i'll check into it. :)