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Old 31st May 2010, 07:35 AM   #15
A. G. Maisey
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Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 6,701
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It depends what your personal standards are.

If you want to try to make it look as it was when newly carved, you could proceed as Marco suggests, and fill the cracks with hard wax of a compatible colour.

I personally don't like this approach, but I must emphasise that this is a valid approach. My dislike of it is just a personal thing. I used to follow this approach many years ago, and hilts with cracks that I have from 30 or 40 years ago have often been filled with one medium or another.

However, these days I tend to do as little as I can get away with when it comes to old hilts. If I think I can take up cracking with oil, I'll follow that course, but if the cracks are not too bad, I'm more inclined these days to leave them as they are.

My objection to the use of fillers is that they are a purely cosmetic approach that does absolutely nothing to assist preservation:- in other words, they can make something look good for perhaps your lifetime, but in time the filler will fall out and you're left with a hilt that still needs attention.

We only have a loan of any of these things --- keris, hilts & etc. If we truly have a love of the art and a respect for the craftsmen who produced it, we have an obligation to try to make it last another generation or two.

If this were my hilt I'd probably start hand rubbing raw linseed into it. The cracking is not bad, and I could easily live with it the way it is, but that wood looks hungry to me. I'd probably put this alongside my lounge chair and feed it with hand rubbed raw linseed for a couple of months and see what happens. Just a few drops in the palm of your hand and rub it in until it disappears from the surface of the wood, and your hands. Concentrate on the cracks and try to work the oil into the cracks.
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