That's a good video, gives a real good idea of the forge work involved in producing the billet from which a keris is made, but this part of the process, although hot & heavy work, is the easy part, and the part that many makers are happy enough to farm out to somebody else.
Sometimes they supervise the smith & the strikers, sometimes not, just give instructions and pay for the end result.
The really difficult part of making a keris is the cold work, the carving.
I've made a few keris, the longest time it took me to produce a keris blade was 49 man-days, 8 & 10 hour working days.
Of those 49 days, there were 9 days spent on forge work, three men, a smith and two strikers, working for three days.
The balance of the time was spent on carving the keris.
It could have been carved more quickly if I had used electric tools, but I used all traditional tools, not electric.
There really is a lot of work in making a keris.
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