Metal Balinese hilt with sheath

[A. G. Maisey]

GIO, I think you might be half right.

The forging from which we carve a keris blade is left quite thick & heavy, the pesi is cut square and reduced little by little, not necessarily all at the same time.

It could be that this blade was a failure:- the original billet was made too small, the forging could not be left at adequate thickness to carve a proper blade from, so rather than waste the money that was already in it, it was turned into something to keep some halfway pretty dress together.

It would serve quite OK for a poor man's marriage keris.

So not something that was part-way through manufacture and that could eventually end up as an actual keris, but something that was a failure of manufacture.

Based upon what I can see in the images, this blade was not shaped with an electric grinder, but with a file. grinders tend to leave uninterrupted curved lines, the lines on this blade are straight and in some places form a hatch-work effect.