What happened with this blade?
 

I have this keris now nearly 20 years. It would be very interesting for me to know what happened to this blade. Is it possible that is an old repair because the pamor chipping off from the blade?

Regards,

Detlef

Hi Detlef,
It looks like a cold shut that was made worse by ritual washing .
I have a cold shut on a pamor pendok in my collection; it is like a little flap of iron and will someday no doubt break off .

Hi Rick,

one of my first thoughts as well but when you look at pic. 6 you can see that the colour of the "bridge"-metal is different so my thought that it is a possible repair. :shrug: But exactly this may be the reason for this repair.
Sorry for the not clear pictures, I have tried my best but the weather here allow only pictures by flash light.

Regards,

Detlef

Detlef, I suggest that you take this blade into very good light, and closely examine the apparent patches under magnification.

That would be where I would start.

On the side of the blade opposite to the apparent patch, I am assuming that there will be one of the pools of pamor which form the pamor motif. If this is so, the indentation that caused that pool of pamor may have been taken a bit too deep during the manufacture process, and with time the iron covering has eroded and exposed nickel from the other side of the blade.

Yes, the colour of the apparent patch seems to be brighter than the other contrasting material, but it seems to me that at least one layer of the contrasting material is also a brighter colour, it looks like there are flecks of brighter colour contrasting material along the blade.

To do a weld of the technical difficulty required to place a small nickel patch onto an already very worn blade would be very, very difficult, most especially with the forge technology available in Jawa, either in previous times, or now.

Alan,

thank you very much for comment, I have hoped that you will do so since I think that you have the best knowledge of forging technic and when someone will know what happened with this blade it will be you.
I have looked many times already by good light and with magnification to this point of the blade and are still unsure. You are correct, on the opposite of the blade is one of the pools and first I have thought that it come through but there is a little space between the iron and this "nickel" (I think that it is nickel). I have tried to take some better pictures to show it. But I will take pictures again by daylight to show the very different colour.

Regards,

Detlef

I have got this keris from a person with great knowledge about keris and he has got it in Indonesia/Java like this. He also don't have had a explanation for it. I have some little understanding from my profession about metal and also in my eyes it seems very difficult to patch a small amount nickel on but what I can see happened exactly this. But I will try to take better pictures by daylight and hope that it is than to see what I see even that the pamor pool chipping from the iron and someone tried to repair it (at down it break again).

Thank you again,

Detlef

If this keris was purchased recently in Indonesia, anything is possible.

With these better pics it is obvious that a weld such as this is something that would require the skill of Merlin.

I feel that the dreaded Alteco may be involved here.

Alteco is what is mostly used in Jawa as a super glue.

Alternatively, maybe they've not actually welded, but heated the blade as much as they dare, and then dropped a little bit of molten nickel onto it. I really hate some of the tricks these shysters get up to. If you've got an old blade, respect it, let it keep its integrity and don't screw around with it. Of course, the fault all lays with uneducated collectors:- they want more than is reasonable, so the gentlemen in Jawa will always try to give the buyers what they want. Its the old:- "buyer is always right" thing in action.

After that little tirade, there is another possibility, and it goes like this:- when the blade was originally welded the pamor material was broken, nor in a single paper-thin layer, but in several layers. One of these layers overlapped another and failed to weld --- you cannot weld nickel to nickel, you need the iron in between to act as glue --- this layer that did not stick would now run under one pool of pamor, and its edge would run over the edge of the other pool of pamor. This is a possibility, but then I can see the way that the iron adjacent to the "patch" has little bits of paleness to it, don't know what this is, but it doesn't look right.

I really do not know what has happened here, there are too many possibilities, and I don't like the sound of any of them. Speaking only for myself, I'd move this blade along by any means possible, and be prepared to take a loss on it.

It seems that one layer of iron, under the nickel alloy, got consumed because of repeated etchings.
I got the impression that also the entire pamor at the left of latest pics is about to detach.