[A. G. Maisey]

Roland, I intended to reserve comment on this warangan job, but since you yourself now recognise that it is a very poor effort, I will comment.

I have been getting blades stained in Solo for more than 40 years. There are various qualities of staining that can be done, but for quite some time, the only quality that has been available to ordinary retail customers has been the the lowest quality. A good warangan job can take bulk time and cost a lot more than the ordinary job.

Once warangan has been done the blade should be taken into direct sunlight and the light played along the blade so that you can see through the black. If you can find patches of green or yellow this is an indication that the blade has not been cleaned properly prior to staining. The stainers who do work for the retail trade do not like to clean a blade perfectly before they do the stain, because if a blade is left with a little residue from a previous stain it will reactivate and the job is done much more quickly and easily. This is the reason that I prefer to clean my own blades before I put them in to be stained, additionally I refuse to permit my staining to be done by some people.

You mention that you had already cleaned the blade before you sent it to be cleaned, but a perfectly clean blade can grow rust overnight in Indonesia. Additionally, the person who did the stain probably paid less attention to the finish polish before staining, simply because it was clean. To get anything done acceptably in Solo you need to be there and monitor the work, if not you get an "asal jadi" job, ie, "as long as its done". Quality, pride of craftsmanship is very rare, and if you can find somebody who takes pride in his work, you will get on a queue and wait, and then pay, pay, pay.

Things like swords that have the blade firmly fixed into the hilt with jabung are a bit of a problem, because to do this job properly, the blade should be demounted and then remounted when the stain is complete. Your sword blade was not demounted.The reason that it was not demounted is that for a long time it has been almost impossible to find somebody in Solo who understands how to make and use jabung, and for that matter, how to demount a blade without causing damage.

Put as plainly as possible, in my opinion most of the people who service the trade in Solo are half educated , ham handed tinkerers. I do not know of one genuine m'ranggi who is still working.

I'm talking Solo all the time, because this is the pond I swim in, but I have no reason to believe things are better elsewhere.

If you want a good stain job on your blade you will need to learn the necessary skills to do it yourself.