Two recent purchases

[kisak]

Hello all.

Here's a pair of blades I picked up at a recent auction. First there's a sword which the Auction house had labelled as Tibetan, but based upon LaRocca's "Warrior's of the Himalayas" I would rather say Bhutan. The 19th century feels plausible.

The other one was labelled as a golok, and from looking around a bit here I guess that might be correct. Still mostly a question mark for me though, haven't manged to find anything matching it all that closely, a few pieces that were attributed to Java appearing the closest. Tourist work perhaps? The blade has obviously been through a lot, seems like it might have been cleaned with some rather aggressive chemicals, and there's still a few decent spots of rust. There's a very shallow fuller between about a third of the blade's width from the edge to the decorative groove. Laminate construction at least, the line at the edge is somewhat visible in the pictures. If there's more to it (folding, pattern welding, or so) then it's currently not visible (hidden by the pitting), though there are hints of fine longitudinal lines here and there. Grip appears to be horn (though I won't write off wood entirely either), with repaired cracks. Scabbard is covered in some white metal, a bit of silver polish didn't really affect it at all and it has a slight yellowish hue to it at times, so I guess some sort of copper alloy.

I' contemplating some sort of restoration for the golok, but not really knowing what I have makes it a tough call. On one hand, it isn't in too good a shape now, so it should be relatively easy to avoid making things worse, and it doesn't feel like I'm risking anything of major historical value here. On the other hand, considering the depth of the pitting, I wonder if there would be much of the blade left once the majority of that has been polished off, and I generally hesitate to do anything much to antiques, or even potential antiques. Easier to do than undo, after all.