Info Needed On Tombak

[kai]

Hello Alan,

Thanks for chiming in!

If the clean & stain is not an option I'd go for oil and mechanical I think.

I don't like partial cleans as Kai suggests, I'd possibly give it a WD40 soak, followed by brushing with a stiff brush, plastic or bristle, then spend time under good light with magnification and a pick, I like a saddlers awl for this sort of thing. Little bits of steel wool on the end of a sate stick can clean smooth areas.

If the original stain is still fairly well preserved, I understand your preference going mechanical and gentle. Often this will preserve the original finish with only little of the stain removed (depending an the amount of rust being present). However, this leaves remnants of rust inside any pitting and would need very careful storage (like your soak in oil & wrap procedure).

OTOH, when there was ample rust (especially with pieces from Java and a fairly porous surface structure) and no warangan available, I've seen quite decent results from the simultaneous cleaning+staining in a bath of pineapple juice: Usually the staining got not noticeably degraded (sometimes it got way stronger than visible at the start though!) and the cleaned areas also received fresh staining which didn't appeared uneven. For those with no access to arsenic trioxide, the average result seems to be decent enough. If the staining is not acceptable one can move towards whitening the blade and warangan very quickly.

Is this - I assume - suboptimal result of simultaneous staining (with, say, average-quality blades) really so much inferior to the complete warangan approach? I never tried both approaches with the same blade (at least not when the soak seemed to yield any decent staining).

Regards,
Kai