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Originally Posted by Gee1971
The jeweller told to me the price of silver increased a lot and even prices aren't the same in Asia, he took a calculator with the estimate weight of the sheet of silver on keris and showed me a certain value with the cost of the artwork, he explained the different gold plated methods and blade fabrications, it seems have a certain experience, he told me he is now retired and served in the french commandos in Algeria but he had a critical view about the fabrication, found a little suspect the colour at the biginning and finally, he told me I haven't loose my money.
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Gaëtan, if you are comfortable with this gentleman's appraisal of your blade and it makes you feel good about your purchase, that is a fine thing. We try very hard not to get into money values too deeply here on the forum and in fact it is part of the rules here that we do not do appraisals openly in the forums. Ultimately it is a matter of weather or not YOU like your keris, not the nuts & bolts value of the thing. But i do think that it is probably important that you understand what some members are trying to get across to you so that in the future you can be a more informed buyer. Though the sheath work is extensive and not unpleasant, this is not what i would consider high quality metal work for this area. Given that i would suggest that your jeweler is out of his field when he has appraised the value of the workmanship. I cannot image that the sheet silver here weighs up to enough to account for much of his appraised value so it would seem that he is putting a great deal of the value on this workmanship. I don't know what your jeweler knows about keris from his experiences as a French commando in Algeria,
, but this blade adds very little value to the silver weight of this keris. It is fairly low grade village work. There is nothing wrong with that and i own many keris which are not of very high quality which i quite enjoy. But it is, i believe, important to know what you've got before continuing on with your collecting. We all try to justify the money we spend on these things (especially to out wives
). We all have some bad purchases in our collecting history as well, of this i am sure. Some of my bad purchases i still enjoy (even if i wish i hadn't paid as much for them as i did
), but by recognizing them as bad purchases i have learned lessons that i hopefully will not have to repeat.