[David]

Originally Posted by Henk

As i mentioned before, you couldn't enter an auction house or fleemarket here in Holland without stumbling over these soldier keris. Sometimes just 10 in a box.
If you had a lot of more keris in an auction house 10 to 1 you had 1 or 2 of such keris among them.

It is certainly not detecting the quality of wood from a picture as handling these keris so many times that it is not hard to recognize this kind of keris and recalling the quality of wood on all these keris.
I would be very surprised when the wood of Chregu's scabbard would be of a different wood quality than the scabbards of these type of keris.

And to be honest, i owned both of these soldier keris shown here by Chregu and Rick in this thread. Sometimes it drove me to madness discovering again a soldier keris among the few keris i bought. Just reselling and hoping it wouldn't take too long before someone was willing to buy it.
I sold them all accept one with a lying lion wrongko. Today i regret i didn't kept such a keris as Chregru is showing. Regrets because i realize more and more the historical period these keris represent. But i'm convinced today or tomorrow i will stumble against such a keris like Chregru's for fish and chips because here in Holland these keris are still considered as the first tourist items brought back by our soldiers.

Henk, i must say that over the years i have seen many of these "soldier keris" and like all things keris they come in all different levels of quality. So i do not know how you can possibly make the assumption that the quality of the wood will be the same on every one of this type of dress. Certainly a majority of these keris are going to be in this less quality of wood and execution, but not all. I went back for just a brief search in the archives and dug up a few examples that have been presented in the past by Erik, Alan and Ganja that are all of a much finer quality in both carving and wood than, say, Rick's example (no offense Rick ). I recall once seeing a particularly fine example that surpasses these ones by far, but i haven't come across it in my quick search. So all i can think is that maybe you have just been looking in the wrong boxes at flea markets all these years.