New Balinese Kersi got

[HughChen]

After learning in the forum for so long, I decided to buy something oversea. And I got them from an auction today (haven't reveived), how do you think of it?

[HughChen]

I got two Keris and several hilts

[milandro]

they both seem to be old blades.

The first one is in a Bali Sarong but is not a Balinese blade (looks Sumatran to my eye but I may be wrong), Pamor looks nice, the ganja seems to be tilted therefore probably detached.

The second one has a nice , bone(?) Madurese hilt, the blade may be a Madurese one too.

The pamor is not really very evident from the pictures.

I don't know where you are in the world (China?) but replacing sarongs to fit the blades may prove a complicated task.

[HughChen]

Originally Posted by milandro

they both seem to be old blades.

The first one is in a Bali Sarong but is not a Balinese blade (looks Sumatran to my eye but I may be wrong), Pamor looks nice, the ganja seems to be tilted therefore probably detached.

The second one has a nice , bone(?) Madurese hilt, the blade may be a Madurese one too.

The pamor is not really very evident from the pictures.

I don't know where you are in the world (China?) but replacing sarongs to fit the blades may prove a complicated task.

Yes, we don't have specialist in making Kris swords and accessories here in China. Maybe the forum can teach us how to DIY. Even if we can't do it by ourselves, we can also ask a regular carpenter to do it for us.

[milandro]

I'd be very cautious in doing DIY things, not only because it isn't easy but also because the whole point is to do things in the correct way if you have to do that at all!

Even if (and I've done so a couple of times) you commission these dresses in Indonesia of course an artisan in Bali or Madura may have an interpretation of a kris made in a different tradition that ends up being incorrect. The same goes for any other part of the kris.

There are tutorial videos on YouTube but again, I would be VERY careful that the person that you may commission this in China would not only understand what to do but also would do it matching correctly a blade from Bali to a Balinese dress and hilt and ring or a Sumatran Kris to a Sumatran dress and attributes.

The best thing to do is to buy things which are not in need of any replacement.

Restorations too can be a fool's errand if you don't know what you are doing.
There is the case of this famous young guy Alec Steele who bought a kris on line (incomplete) and proceeded to " restore" the thing.


It was a complete pointless thing. The kris (which he said was ancient , 15th century, or so he was told ) had no ganja to start with (and finish) then he made an hilt (resembling a sajen kris) which he glued to the kris (!) he put no mendak there....


Be also very careful if you are entertaining the thought of staining your blades.

[A. G. Maisey]

A long time ago, like 70 years ago & more, I had the idea in my head that I wanted to get every keris ever made. Yeah, silly, I know, but I was only a little kid & I knew next to nothing. But anyway, what I did manage to do was buy every keris I came across, provided I didn't need to rob a bank to get the cash --- yeah, banks used to keep cash behind the counter back in the dark ages. I bought keris & all things related to keris. A lot of the keris I bought did not have scabbards. There was a lot more keris & other edged weapons floating around in pawn shops & auctions & antique shops back in the 1950's & 1960's in Australia than there are now.

If we have an example to follow, it is not a real difficult job to carve a gayaman or sandang walikat scabbard, & it is an easy job to make a gandar. If we already have the atasan --- top part of the scabbard --- it is not difficult to fit it to a different blade to the one that it was made for.

These are not difficult jobs, but they are tedious and you do need to be able to handle tools.

The work I have done in making, repairing & fitting scabbards for blades is not up to the standard of the craftsmen in Jawa & Bali & other places who do this for a living, but it is for the most part better than fair, & for maybe the last 40 years it is indistinguishable from work done in Indonesia. But it takes me about ten times as long as it takes a working tukang wrongko.

Restoration of blades is not at all difficult, but this is something that you need training for. Simple stuff like cleaning up edges, making a new gonjo, I think most people with some tools skill can handle that, staining takes time to learn, everything else you need training for.

I would encourage people to not be afraid to try. Start on little things, work carefully, work slowly, do the research. If one does not live in Indonesia or visit regularly, it can be quite difficult to get decent restoration work done, & I believe that for most people, it is not such a difficult thing to learn how to do things oneself.

[HughChen]

Originally Posted by milandro

I'd be very cautious in doing DIY things, not only because it isn't easy but also because the whole point is to do things in the correct way if you have to do that at all!

Even if (and I've done so a couple of times) you commission these dresses in Indonesia of course an artisan in Bali or Madura may have an interpretation of a kris made in a different tradition that ends up being incorrect. The same goes for any other part of the kris.

There are tutorial videos on YouTube but again, I would be VERY careful that the person that you may commission this in China would not only understand what to do but also would do it matching correctly a blade from Bali to a Balinese dress and hilt and ring or a Sumatran Kris to a Sumatran dress and attributes.

The best thing to do is to buy things which are not in need of any replacement.

Restorations too can be a fool's errand if you don't know what you are doing.
There is the case of this famous young guy Alec Steele who bought a kris on line (incomplete) and proceeded to " restore" the thing.


It was a complete pointless thing. The kris (which he said was ancient , 15th century, or so he was told ) had no ganja to start with (and finish) then he made an hilt (resembling a sajen kris) which he glued to the kris (!) he put no mendak there....


Be also very careful if you are entertaining the thought of staining your blades.

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

A long time ago, like 70 years ago & more, I had the idea in my head that I wanted to get every keris ever made. Yeah, silly, I know, but I was only a little kid & I knew next to nothing. But anyway, what I did manage to do was buy every keris I came across, provided I didn't need to rob a bank to get the cash --- yeah, banks used to keep cash behind the counter back in the dark ages. I bought keris & all things related to keris. A lot of the keris I bought did not have scabbards. There was a lot more keris & other edged weapons floating around in pawn shops & auctions & antique shops back in the 1950's & 1960's in Australia than there are now.

If we have an example to follow, it is not a real difficult job to carve a gayaman or sandang walikat scabbard, & it is an easy job to make a gandar. If we already have the atasan --- top part of the scabbard --- it is not difficult to fit it to a different blade to the one that it was made for.

These are not difficult jobs, but they are tedious and you do need to be able to handle tools.

The work I have done in making, repairing & fitting scabbards for blades is not up to the standard of the craftsmen in Jawa & Bali & other places who do this for a living, but it is for the most part better than fair, & for maybe the last 40 years it is indistinguishable from work done in Indonesia. But it takes me about ten times as long as it takes a working tukang wrongko.

Restoration of blades is not at all difficult, but this is something that you need training for. Simple stuff like cleaning up edges, making a new gonjo, I think most people with some tools skill can handle that, staining takes time to learn, everything else you need training for.

I would encourage people to not be afraid to try. Start on little things, work carefully, work slowly, do the research. If one does not live in Indonesia or visit regularly, it can be quite difficult to get decent restoration work done, & I believe that for most people, it is not such a difficult thing to learn how to do things oneself.

I think without a scabbard might be not-so-good but not unacceptable. scabbards are vulnerable.

[milandro]

I have endeavoured to provide any incomplete kris that I have bought with the most coherent and hopefully , correct, attributes.

One such example I have disclosed and discussed in a thread here

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=29008


I think this was my most successful project.

but it is by no means an easy task done at a distance.

It is possible to buy semi finished products on line but, as far as I know this is only possible with Solo and Jogjakarta warangkas ( you can buy hilts and rings on line of various styles, qualities and price). But to obtain a Balinese dress I had to commission the entire thing from scratch and it was made on Bali.

I had done this before with a Melayu dress (which I have sold since then) and familiarised both the process of providing measurements to the artisan.

Upon completion however adjustments were needed and I have had someone here in the NL to help me with it.

[David]

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

I would encourage people to not be afraid to try. Start on little things, work carefully, work slowly, do the research. If one does not live in Indonesia or visit regularly, it can be quite difficult to get decent restoration work done, & I believe that for most people, it is not such a difficult thing to learn how to do things oneself.

Thanks for posting this encouragement. I was going to post something similar in response to Milandro's warnings, but you have stated my unshared points very well.
I believe that what we, as collectors have a responsibility to practice in this regard is to "do no harm". In other words, don't do any restorations that are not reversible. Regarding redressing a keris, if i do so i surely keep the old parts that i replace and do my best not to damage anything, even parts i am replacing. If i got something wrong, i can always return to the where i began.
If a keris has no dress i do feel somewhat obligated to dress it. As Milandro rightly points out, this can be difficult for people that don't live in Indonesia. I have even a greater challenge living in North America than Milandro has in the Netherland, where at least there is a strong and direct history and connection to Indonesia and more access to keris collections. Most people over here have never even heard of keris.
My most successful restoration of a keris was probably this one. I received it just as an unstained blade with just a hilt. I washed the blade and stained it with warangan i made with lab grade arsenic trioxide. This was a fairly early staining experiment for me and i could probably do a better job today. But the perspective i adopted here was, is it an improvement over how the blade looked previous to the process and the answer here was definitely yes. The thing about staining blades is that it is indeed something that i believe we get better at with practice. If you don't try it you will never get any good at it. It is probably wise to start out trying it on relatively unimportant blades in your collection. But if we don't get good results we have not ruined the blade. Simply bring the blade back to "white" and try again. Of course we must be careful about the strength of acids we use as you don't want to damage the blade. But the fruit juice acids i was using at the time are pretty safe in this regard.
After staining i located a mendhak for the ensemble. This was perhaps the easiest part and they are easily available on the internet. The more difficult part was, of course, the wrongko. I did not want to risk sending the blade back to Indonesia for fitting. A kind member and mentor here was able to source an unfitted and unfinished wrongko with a brass pendok. Basically this means that it had merely a small round hole drilled through the atasan and it was up to me to fit the blade, attach the gandar and finish the wood. I did NOT do a perfect job on this fitting. I will admit that this is not really my strongest skillset. But i did manage something that i felt was acceptable and now i had a fully dressed blade where before i did not. Lastly i wanted to give the ensemble a little bit more class so i had a thick silver plating added to the pendok.
So i stated this project out as a collector with very few skills doing this kind of thing and ended up with a completed ensemble that while not perfect, is at least acceptable to me. I also learned a great deal in the process and feel much better prepared to do an even better job next time if i were to undertake such a project again. Most importantly, i have done no harm to the keris itself in the process, unlike that idiot kid Alec Steele, who destroyed what little was left of a relic keris blade after doing no real accurate research on what he was undertaking.
All this to say that while i appreciate that we must indeed be cautious when embarking on DIY restoration projects, we also must be careful not to completely discourage collectors from such work where it is needed and appropriate.
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showth...highlight=Kebo