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Originally Posted by CharlesS
Thanks for all these pics. At first glance this looks like a drool fest....
There are far too many pieces here to try to go through piece by piece, but overall, I would say that the vast majority of these pieces are newly produced, produced from parts, or have somehow been reworked.
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Originally Posted by Bill Marsh
Echoing Charles... New made. I wondered were all the tourist pieces came from. Now I understand better.
There may be a gem hiding in there --- somewhere.  But there sure is an awful (with emphasis on the "awful") lot of -- let's just say pieces I would not even think about buying.  |
Hi Charles, Hi Bill,
Yes that's true. I'm very new to this stuff and yet even to my untrained eye the newness of some (if not many) of the items is very much apparent.
Most of the storekeepers I've met are not passing them off as antiques or old items, however.
And at least one of them storekeepers, who happened to be the owner of the shop also [he's a Maranao], was very much transparent to me in telling me which item is old, and which are repros and/or 'tourist'.
Like what I've also read in this forum, once you've shown to the storeowner that you do not belong to that 95% tourist market and you are more on the 5% serious collector niche (am just guessing the percentages), then they start showing you the good stuff from the backroom.
Then that's when it really gets interesting!
In any case, even if you don't get to buy anything, it's still very much fun sifting through the items, tourist or otherwise. And if the storeowner happened to have a genuine interest on blades too, then all the more your day is made.