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Old 11th August 2009, 09:07 PM   #15
A. G. Maisey
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Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 6,716
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I don't know that I'd be inclined to call it a wengkon. Yes, it has some characteristics of a wengkon, but we've still got that random pamor below the "wengkon" and the core of the blade.

To be frank, I prefer not to get too involved with the refined niceties of pamor types. I'm pretty relaxed about the whole thing. In the group of people with whom I associate in Jawa, most of whom are dealers, we tend to paint with a rather broad brush.This is somewhat different to the current collector attitude that wants to define and categorise to the Nth. degree. Amongst the people I mostly associate with, if we see anything that is any kind of random pamor, we call it wos wutah. What we call wos wutah, the bulk of collectors in Jawa would probably want to categorise into a multitude of sub-types.

Your blade looked at in cross section, has a core, a layer of random pamor, and one of the layers of contrasting material in that random pamor is marginally thicker than the others.

The question then must be asked:-

did the maker produce this pattern intentionally, attempting to create a wos wutah/wengkon pamor?

or was the folding of the pamor material less than expert and he finished up with a layer of contrasting material on the outside of the forging?

did he then realise that his blade was not going to be thick enough and he added a layer of iron to compensate?

A wengkon is a very difficult pamor to produce. It requires an enormous amount of both forge control and benchwork control. This keris might be the result of a conscious effort to produce a wengkon, but the control is far from good, so it might also be the result of error correction. Since none of us were there looking over the maker's shoulder, I'd say that we can take our own decisions on the matter.
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