My First Experience With Scarf Welding on a Moro Kriss
 

Scarf welding is not particularly uncommon on Malay sundang, but this is my first experience with it on a Moro kriss. The forte seems to be from steel more comparable to 'pamor' steel, but you can easily see where that stops and the more imaginative pattern weld begins.

The copper-wrapped hilt is unique as well.

It's always interesting to see these sort of details. I wonder if this was a matter of using up material that was on hand, or a repair-recycle of a broken blade.

I'd like to see the other side of the blade near the tang/grip. The delamination in the middle looks like a smith that got too fancy stacking and forge welding & didn't want to start over and waste more time on it, rather than a scarf. A scarf near the tang between a less hard & more resilient tang piece, and a hardener blade would not be uncommon or deleterious in a new blade or a repaired blade whose tang had snapped for being too hard. Is that copper or suasa alloy? Looks rather untarnished for copper.

I wondered if it was suasa as well.

Only testing will tell for sure.

However, by the hue of the metal, I'm actually leaning toward copper.

More pics...definitely polished copper and the scarf weld.
You may have already noticed a considerable number of forging flaws in the pattern weld.

Charles,

I'm thinking the hilt decoration is a relatively recent redo. The asang asang are not a pair, with the second one looking quite new, and the cord wrap also looks fairly recent to me. The pommel seems older and could be original. The blade itself appears to be 19th C work.

Ian, it’s a good point you make. Originally the copper cover was a patinated black. I polished it to get it back to the way it looked originally. It may be a later addition, but the cording is dry rotted and very fragile which lends some credence to its age. I think this is quite an old sword so the fact that it may have seen several grip re-dos would not surprise me at all.

The considerable number of flaws makes me wonder if the blade had been broken, and because, for whatever reason, the pattern welded blade was recycled and given a new life.
I also wonder if the pamor patterns have any meaning that could be interpreted as would be found on/in a Jawa keris?

We seem to see more and more Moro swords lately that display manipulated work which, I guess, begs the question about Pamors and whether the Malays/ Moros attributed any powers to them, or whether it was just considered fancy work. :confused: