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Old 11th December 2022, 07:19 PM   #2
David
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: Nova Scotia
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Originally Posted by sirek View Post
Hello everyone,
A Balinese hilt of copper over wood I have seen quite often (picture 1)
but now i have a hilt of cast bronze weight 400 gr/14,2OZ/0.888LB (seems very heavy to me for a hilt) the previous owner owned it for about 50 years. Is this a rarity?, or do you see this more often? I had never seen a hilt of solid bronze?
I can't say that i have seen one of these created in cast bronze before either. So i do suppose in that sense we could consider this a "rarity". The better question though might be "is it desirable"? For myself, with admittedly little experience with a hilt of this type, i would say probably not. The weight of the hilt alone might be enough of a discouragement for me. I would think that when we see this style of hilt created in lesser materials like this we are looking at hilts that were made to mimic more elaborate court examples of gold and silver. And this is not a particular good or finely detailed example of a bronze casting. It does appear to have some age, but i think it is more likely vintage rather than antique. I'm not really sure what market or strata of society such a hilt would originally have been created for.
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