Alam Shah, Rick and Tim Simmons,
Since I opened the machinist's box, and I acknowledge the unbelievable advances in technology of this century, I'm trying to understand the feasability of machined keris...The knives presented above don't have complex surfaces like keris. They consist of many machined components, cutting and removal from a "damascus" billet -or granted, a fully forged blade- and manual assembly, no?
I guess the wilah could be mold-injected molten material, but then it's all wrong
and you would get some sort of alloy/fused steel, not pamor. You could try using combinations of press and rollers but...how?? There's no automatic/mechanical process to my knowledge that could duplicate the manual shaping of the blade. Assuming a pre-forged shaped blade, how to carve the prabot? CAM milling could easily duplicate the ricikan of these nice keris in aluminium alloy, but if the machines were put to work on the low laminate keris blades, how would they fare? Wouldn't this irreparably mangle the pamor layers?
Having more or less broken down the work involved, are CAM keris possible?
Next time I'm around a shop, I'll ask
.
Regards,
Manolo