Good video, thank you for posting the link MitsuWa.
As to tools..this shows me that they and the art will most likely survive as they are taking advantage of faster ways of doing the grunt work. I am sure that they would make the Keris entirely by hand with all traditional tools if one were to pay the difference in time/effort for doing so.
We tend to have a romantic idea of craft production. We want to have an item which was worked by a village of masters for a year and lovingly handed down through the generations for us to find and treasure (and if we find it for a bargain price mores the better). The reality may well be that war was coming and they needed to get out two of them a day or the local King said "you will by the end of the week or else..." and you did.
I recall an illuminated image on parchment of a Northern European using a 3 foot rotating grinding wheel on a sword blade...from about 1000AD. I have not looked, but I would bet there is an analog in Indonesia carved in stone relief on a minor temple.
Almost all of the traditional techniques I have seen are the most efficient way of performing a task given the technology of the time and the desired outcome. If you change one of those parameters then so too changes the technique.
Ric
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