Ladrang wrongkos are very easy to damage. In fact, any good quality Solo wrongko is very easy to damage, as even the gayams get the edges carved paper thin. These things are works of art, and need to be treated as such. If you trawl the markets in Jawa it is rare---very rare--- to find a second hand wrongko that does not have some damage.
Many of the keris that I have bought outside of Jawa have been badly damaged when I bought them, and honestly Rick, I would not call the damage to your wrongko at all serious. Yeah, it was a nasty thing to happen, and when it did I reckon all the blood rushed to your feet, but it was really a minor injury as far as ladrangs go. In Solo, a wrongko that has been badly damaged will often be given a sungging treatment---repaired, and then painted.
In Jawa the most usual adhesive and gap filler would be button shellac, which is fragile, but if supported provides pretty good adhesion, or in recent years some sort of super glue rubbish, which is good for maybe 12 months, when it lets go.
Ordinary wood working glue is not really very good for this sort of repair, five minute epoxy tinted with a suitable artist's colouring agent is the best approach. In a wrongko like your's, Rick, I would have tinted the epoxy with burnt umber, and the resultant dark brown viens would just have looked like original wood grain. I would then have sanded and polished the wrongko again
and finished with a commercial gunstock finish.
Wood working glue is not real good, because to achieve a good bond with wood working glue, you need to clamp the joint. It is almost impossible to clamp a joint in the top part of a wrongko. You can use a stocking wrapped around it sometimes, but for a joint like the ones in your job Rick, I doubt if this would be possible.
Did you apply the shellac with a brush, or a rubber?
If with a brush, did you kill it after your last coat, or can you still pick up brush marks if you put light across it?
Sometimes you can get big holes in a gandar, or dry rot in old atasan. The best thing to fill these holes is plastic putty---I've used some stuff called "Plastibond". Again, you tint it with artist's colour. Over-fill, polish back. With a gandar you need to fix some sort of support for the filler inside the hole ; a thin piece of bambu is good for this, just epoxy it in place on the inside, and then you can fill to your hearts content.
I've put up pics of this wrongko before, but its a good example of what you can do with epoxy and colour. I did this repair many years ago, but the when I got this wrongko, the top part was in pieces, and the gandar had big holes in it. The dark brown patches you see on the left hand side of the gandar are patches of Plastibond. Some of the brown graining in the top part of the wrongko is tinted five minute epoxy . The finish is Birchwood Casey Trueoil.
I reckon that it is possible to fix just about anything that might be damaged in a keris, or its wrongko.
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