Penangsan, if it is "the old tradition", all I can say is that any keris maker who could achieve a tight fit of the ganja to the blade base by using this shrink fit method knew a technique of mating metal surfaces that was far in advance of anything known today.
One of my sons owns a precision metal working factory. His normal work involves working to the smallest tolerances imaginable, and the mating of one flat metal surface to another flat metal surface. Using his state of the art methods he tells me he could mate the base of a ganja to the base of a blade with no gap, using a shrink fit method to fit the ganja. However, when I asked him if it were possible for him to do it with hand tools, he told me what I already knew:- impossible to achieve a neat fit.
That your teacher, and others before him , could achieve this neat fit by shrink fitting the ganja simply astounds me --- and for the most part Peninsula blades do have a neatly fitting ganja.
During my lifetime I have cleaned, stained, repaired a very large number of blades. I don't know how many, but a lot. Many of those blades were Peninsula blades, I would guess that most were from the 19th century. I cannot recall ever noticing a single blade, Peninsula or otherwise, that used a shrink fit ganja. Often a crimped ganja will appear to be a shrink fit, and it is only when you look very closely and see the punch marks around the pesi that you realise how it was fitted. Sometimes these punch marks might have been filed flat, and you can often detect this by use of a loupe.
Yes, of course a ganja that has been shrink fitted to the pesi will be kept tightly in place.
However, in the case of the blade under discussion I draw your attention to the large gap that is visible around the pesi:- any maker who could cut the pesi slot with such precision as to permit shrink fitting of the ganja could most certainly cut that slot to a neat fit around the top of the slot; additionally, the base of the pesi has been mated to the base of the blade with reasonable precision, yes, its not good, but it is certainly better than could be achieved at the first attempt with hand tools --- and shrink fitting demands that you get it right first time:- with a shrink fit you cannot remove and replace the ganja two or three hundred times until you get the mating of surfaces correct --- you need to get it right first time.
I'm waiting for Pak Ganja to dig some of the muck out from around the pesi and between the blade base and the pesi, and tell us just exactly how the ganja has been attached to this blade.
|