Shrew, play around with darkening your diffuse a lot and lighting up your specular equally. Metal's surface info is in the spec, not the diffuse -- a blade with no direct lighting will be dark and formless.
Models are awesome, textures are lacking. Metal is very low contrast and dark except for highlights. Get rid of that noisy, cloudy shit and get some flatter, darker surface detail in there to contrast with your highlights. If you have a flat surface, there's very little reason for it to be dark in one place and lighter a…