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Originally Posted by Manolo
Aye! That's some mean damage! I'm amazed that the tang is so short...on Kurdish khanjars it practically goes through the whole hilt I think. The gluing together could be achieved with a variety of epoxy and forms of cutler's cement...there was a recent post about how to mix some up, and you could use powdered pigment to match the ivory colour.
I have no idea how the blade was originally set, but maybe it would loosen under heat.
As for the blade nick??! I have a similar problem with an old khukri, where a part of the edge had delaminated in time, coming loose after a couple of whacks on a log  I think further grinding would be too destructive in this case, and it would ruin the lines of the blade...
The best and hardest solution I can think of is finding a competent bladesmith who could sort of re-forge and harden the edge...but then could also ruin any wootz structure...alternately, you could use some steel epoxy to fill in the edge so the nick and crack doesn't propagate any further.
14" is huge!! It's almost a short sword...From the cut of the hilt this looks Albanian? It's beautiful, I hoe you can bring its glory back!
Emanuel |
Yeah, I was pretty surprised about the short tang as well; from the way the original, old break occured it looks like it can't go more than an inch back into the ivory, perhaps less. The blade is actually slightly loose as it is, so it hopefully will just be a matter of carefully chipping away whatever they used to glue it in, without damaging the hilt. It's hard to see in the pics, but it looks like the tang was broken and welded back onto the blade.
As to the chip, it fortunately is a clean divot out of the edge, with no crack moving away from the site. I think my best bet will be to carefully smooth out the sharp corners so it doesn't snag, and just leave it as is. Once the rest of the rust and hilt damage is cleared up it won't be so glaring an injury. If it was shallower or further towards the tip I *might* have let a professional knifemaker with the right equipment reshape the blade, but as it is they'd have to take away around a 1/4 of the blade in order to preserve the lines, and the gods alone know what that would to to the temper let alone any wootz pattern that might exist.
Albanian, eh? That's what I love about ethnic pieces like this. How the heck did an Albanian jambiya end up in Sitka, Alaska? Has it been sitting around there since the days of the Russian fur trade, or was it a later arrival? I'll never know, but it's fun to speculate!
