1kinko

The steel wool will also introduce a form of steel that will rust very easily. I’d start with a bamboo toothpick.

You can buy it ready made online, Nori brand, and it’s really cheap.

The most direct connection to the mainland was Korea through Tsushima Island. When did cast iron reach Korea and what did they make, for themselves and/or Japan. What was the role of the Dutch?

It’s far harder to make an exact copy of tosogu than to make the original. When you make an original nobody knows the errors you made. That’s why students begin by copying the masters work and why utsushimono are so respected.

Student: What is the secret to eternal happiness? Sensei: To not argue with fools. Student: I disagree! Sensei: Yes, you are right!

A very little Renaissance Wax goes very long way so it’s pretty cheap for what it does. There are many formuli for iron/steel patinas. If you don’t know what the original patina was you just have to pick one that looks good to you. They do usually take several trials and can be pretty frustrating to get a perfectly even patina. You can still find several discussions of the various formuli and their results in the archives of Following the Iron Brush.

Did you guys see that an original Great Wave print just sold for $2.76M?

I remember attending a scientific conference and meeting up with a colleague then a post-doc at the University of Wyoming. He told me about a new method of sharing data between universities electronically. I don’t recall if it was called the internet but it cost nothing to use on campus. Soon the internet was proposed to make the sharing of information and data free to all users of the internet. It was going to revolutionize the advancement of science. I guess the journal publishers had a different idea.

Standard excellent Omori Terihide, but B level compared to Tlognaws Takasi Yoshitoshi fuchi.

For those of us who enjoy (?) deciphering Google Translate, here’s another useful book.

Everybody should own Markus Sesko’s Handbook of Sword Fittings related terms as well as his Encyclopedia of Japanese Swords.

Yup, gold leaf was never used although gold foil was used to overlay using the uttering (bag) method. However, unless the fire gilding is over rusted iron there should be no need to regild since the gold is still firmly attached to the underlying kinko base metal. If you are concerned over basic wearing down of the gold (an aspect cherished by many collectors as a sign of age and wabi-sabi) a competent jeweler can electroplate just those areas by masking the areas not to be gilded.

Finer than any Omori waves I’ve ever seen.

I didn’t think you were going after me, just explaining the difficulties of what I had suggested. And I do really mean that I respect your knowledge and the good works that you do and share.

Funny you should mention the A H Church limited editions. I own one and it is one of the few old books with high resolution printing (not that the Ashmolean online images aren’t better). So it seems we are back where we started from- if I want high resolution images from the Walters Museum, I’m stuck with looking at images that are too dark to be useful. You, sir, know more about this subject than I do, by far, and I applaud your goods works and intentions. But I’ll pass on the braille edition.

Paint strippers usually contain acids which will absolutely strip the patina off the shakudo, copper, and shibuichi. Don’t even think about using paint strippers on Japanese alloys. Your plaques look just dirty and renaissance wax is used after they’ve been cleaned to protect that patina from normal oxidation. My guess is that Ford will soon chip in.

My interest in pdfs is really an interest in the highest resolution. Most printed books simply don’t have high resolution, and the older they are the worse the image quality. Of the 50 or so tosogu books I own, only 5 show the detail level I want. So maybe the split between economic reward and high resolution is including a DVD of the plates, at additional cost of course.

Richard- I’ve been holding back on this for far too long but I seems that most Asian art connections are curated by Chinese, not Japanese. For instance when the Bushell netsuke collection was housed in the DeYoung museum, they were available for view and rotated. Now that collected is part of the Asian Art Museum that largely shows Chinese and Indian art. The relative size of the different populations could also play a large role. It sure would be nice for a Japanese art museum to open in the US (Japantown, SF? and have all these collections available on view.

No previews available for these either. I’ll see if I can use my B&N account to return it if I don’t see what I’m interested in. Have you thought of selling pdfs online? That way I could print on photo paper.

And then there are the museums who want $250 to show the ura side.

I completely agree. They’ve got some very nice fittings but absolutely failed at photography. If you figure out a way to print them please let us know. Dany Chan is supposed to be in charge of that collection (at extension 612) and as you know Laura Seitter is supposed to be in charge of photography. Maybe they should talk?

Why not shiro shibuichi? I’ve got a tsuba that Ford helped me cast (New Hampshire class) that is 60-70% silver that looks like pure silver and required sulfide treatment to darken (quickly) but might have darkened naturally over a long period of time.

I was thinking the same thing. Is Dale really some kind of advanced AI? So quick, so accurate and insightful, and with references too!

Not to take away from the work Dale is publishing, but Lethal Elegance is currently on sale on Amazon for $11 plus change. The high resolution photos make a huge difference in understanding the workmanship.

Books are OK but handling and examining with an Optivisor is much better. Attend some sword shows and get to know knowledgeable dealers.