As you can see, I just got the basic model done. I’m about to start working on the textures and adding some finer detail to the model. I’m going to work on getting the cross-like holes in the blade, just a little tired atm and don’t want to make a big mess adding too many edge loops.
The first pic is the model I have in front of me that I am using as reference.
Looks good, though your going to have fun with the holes 
If I was modeling that i’d model the blade with bezier curves, use them to do the holes and then convert to a mesh -> would be so much easier, but it might be too late now, so… good work
I haven’t really done any modeling with bezier curves yet, might have to play around with that. I was thinking I might end up remaking the blade to get the holes in it anyway.
Yeah, the way to go is using curve, otherwise you going to be pulling your hair out trying to fix all the extra points you add into the mesh. Looks good, can’t wait to see a textured render of it. 
After playing with the curves and doing some thinking, I decided to create a seperate object in the shape of the holes. I then put it in the spots I needed, scaled/rotated/duplicated and after seperating the main part of the blade, I created the edge loops I needed and merged the points together. Finally, I deleted the uneeded faces and there you have it, some holes 
A lot more work than using curves but, I think the mesh looks a little cleaner in the end. The curves seemed to give me a lot of triangles when I made the holes also, just being picky.
The modeling could be neater, but the end results good.
As far as the mesh goes I would take the edges from the top and middle holes and run them into each other instead of out to the edges, like you have between the middle and bottom holes. That would go a long way in improving the mesh.
But the end result is what matters and it renders fine.
Yea, I’m not entirely satisfied with the mesh. I’m not that good at cleaning it up once it’s made yet though. I’m thinking if I would’ve used the knife (which I forgot all about while doing it) to make the loops instead of Ctrl-R, I could’ve got a cleaner result.
Still a lot to learn, just gotta keep making stuff
