Barong restoration suggestion...

[zelbone]

Hey Spunger, nice barong. The only way to really fix that is to pop the hilt off, straighten the punto, and then carved the little wood shims that fit between the punto and the blade. That's if you want to do it the correct traditional way. I'm sure Battara would agree with me about that.

BUT...

As Lew mentions, the wood epoxy putty works pretty good and is a lot easier than than carving those anoying little shims. Plus, you can stain them to whatever color you like.

Here's some photos of a barong restoration I did about a year ago. Shelley and I were at a collectors arms show here and this seller sold me this little talibon, a dagger from Luzon, and this junked barong for about the price of a carton on smokes and a few six packs (i.e. dirt cheap ) The barong was in such sad shape that Shelley passed it up. I couldn't refuse. Anyways, the hilt was off and there was a huge chunk of wood missing from the side of the hilt, the wrapping was mostly gone, and a little chunk of wood missing from the beak of the kakatua. The only redeeming quality of the barong was the blade...it was covered in cosmoline and it had a complete scabbard (which also needed work.) I took it home cleaned off the cosmoline and then etched the blade to find a wonderful damascus pattern. I then decided that since this is going to be a total restoration of the hilt or rebuild, I didn't care too much about traditional methods and opted for modern conveniences. It wasn't a datu class junggayan hilt, but your ordinary fighting barong. So here are some pics of the stages of restoration. The first pic is the hilt off the blade with some epoxy putty I used to build up the missing chunk of wood. The second pic is fitting the hilt onto the blade to size things up. The third photo is adding more epoxy putty to build up the grip area. The last photo is the grip area filed down and sanded into shape