Kintsugi - Repair Of A Urushi Pen

[MartinPauli]

A Manu Propria pen came in a few weeks ago that was dropped on a hard stone floor and a chip flew away that couldn't be found. For Japanese style pens (ebonite & Urushi) there is only one way to repair, The technique is called "kintsugi". Mending with gold, a technique used for mending porcelain and ceramic. What is your opinion?

 

Wikipedia

(Kintsugi (金継ぎ, "golden joinery"), also known as Kintsukuroi (金繕い, "golden repair"),^[1] is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique.^[2][3][4] As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.⁾

 

I wish you all a pleasant weekend

 

Martin

 

[stan]

It is the wabi sabi fix. Commonly used on quality porcelain and pottery.

 

The only alternate is to create a piece from an alternate material and bond to the cap. Can be done but, a lot of work to do right.

 

After bonded and finished to match the curvature (it may be possible to create a piece with matching curvature before bonding), bonding adhesive will need to fill any open joints and removed to provide a flat surface. Getting any threading to work will be a challenge. Not impossible, just challenging.

 

Now the really tricky task. Applying new urushi. Urushi is a natural material and no two batches are an exact match. Maybe if synthetic urushi was used. Assuming a perfect match, there may always be a noticeable area where the new urushi was applied. Over time it may even age differently.

 

Gosh. I wish I had the time to try this repair. Seems like a lot of fun.

[MartinPauli]

Thank you for your comment. Normally for mending (gluing) ceramic pieces together the kintsugi artist uses "Nori-Urushi" or "Mugi-Urushi" a mixture of "Ki-Urushi" raw urushi, water and rice flour. For filling larger parts "Kokusô-Urushi" is used. Kokusô-Urushi is a mix from Mugi-Urushi and fine saw dust. It takes around 14 days to properly harden. Grinding down the Kokuso-Urushi on ceramic and porecllain is not difficult because the material is harder than urushi. On the pen I built up the piece with many layers of pure urushi and brass powder

[Tseg]

I like the idea of flaunting a repair if done well with quality materials. It is one thing if trying to mend an antique, but something else if the piece is current. And I suppose the term 'antique' is all relative, so maybe disregard that thought.

[stan]

Good article with video on kitsugi:

 

http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2016/04/22/kintsugi-the-japanese-art-of-repairing-broken-ceramics/

[MartinPauli]

Repairing antique urushi pens is indeed tricky because one doesn't know exactly the material used.

In urushi trade companies and artisans have often mixed urushi with oils, chemicals or resin to ease or speed up working process.

[Tinjapan]

I know know urushi can be repaired as used to be done on armor. However, just about everything being different in between armor and pens, not sure that researching how armor urushi was repaired would be fruitful.

 

Come to think of it, my kendo armour’s dou is urushi over leather. I was told that the company that applied the urushi is just a town or two over and that they can repair their urushiware.

[MartinPauli]

In old Japan almost everyting was coated with urushi, for protecting the surface or as a decoration.

To build up a proper urushi lacquer around 30 steps are necessary

 

First the base is prepared for foundation. On wood a coat of raw urushi is applied and rubbed awa (Fuki-Urushi), on metal parts ki-urushi is burned in over a coal fire (yakitsuge).

Then Foundation is built up, them middle layers and top layers.

 

For repair of your kendo dô, depending to the depth of the damage the necessary layers would be removed and rebuilt, relacquered

 

The link brings you to my urushi glossary where you can learn more oabout urushi

https://www.manupropria-pens.ch/angularmomentum-manupropria/uploadfiles/static/b9667bc/4877514e-fd4e-4e93-ae38-c98a1742c4e9.pdf/Urushi%20Glossary%20-%20About%20Urushi.pdf

[Siv]

That's a lovely repair - do you have a close-up show of the break? It's interesting to see the thickness of the ebonite vs urush; it looks like it's about half/half.

 

Did you use the brass powder throughout the repair or only on the top layers for decoration?

[MartinPauli]

Thank you very much.

The ebonite is around 1 mm, the lacquer with foundation might be around 0.8 mm.

For building up the urushi was applied layer by layer and each layer was sprinkled with brass powder. After grinding a layer of "shû" red urushi was brushed on then with a cotton ball finest gold powder was applied

[Siv]

Thanks for the reply - very interesting. I thought the gold looked too "gold" to be brass!

 

Why do you use brass powder in the urushi layers, is it for strength?