Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

This is really great results for an early project, none of my first few came out anywhere near so good.

I've been doing traditional kintsugi for about twelve years, a couple hundred successful repairs. Though when I started there was very little instruction or english-language resources available. It's become pretty popular for obvious reasons which is great for people getting into it now.

It remains probably the most difficult and frustrating skill I've ever learned. It's really hard to communicate just how meticulous, near-impossible some of the joins can be. There is a huge variety of technique and nuance to learn about different media and lacquer ratios for different kinds of joins & fills and it all needs to be done by intuition and experience.

And then the medium has no holding power until the curing process is well underway. So you need a lot of creativity to come up with a scaffolding system, pretty much completely unique to each project. Any problem after applying lacquer means hours of careful filing and rework, and more days or weeks of curing.

An edge-of-my-skill repair on a complete shatter takes about 100 hours spread out over 2-3 months. Even just an ideal three piece clean break is easily 8-10 hours and a handful of weeks.

Thank you for the kind words! I've not even scratched the surface of kintsugi of course, but the little I've learned agrees very much with what you say. It's a true test of patience.

Are you entirely self-taught then, or did you find a mentor?

Almost entirely self taught. I've got a few other practitioners I've asked for advice over the years but no one who really had guidance over my learning the way a mentor would.

Early on I got most of my info from the newberry library. It had a collection of illustrations and manuals donated from a defunct lacquerworks museum in japan, for some reason. They had someone around who even helped with a lot of translation for free which was a major help. All this stuff is available and better explained on youtube now though.

I’m working on a shattered teapot and am finding the scaffolding part very difficult. Any tips on holding pieces in place that you’d be willing to share?

Sure thing. For shatters the main thing is just accept that it'll take a while and plan on doing it one or two pieces at a time, ideally starting with the biggest and working down in size. I've seen videos where someone is fitting a whole shatter together in one go and holding it with rubber bands but this almost never works right in my experience.

A pair of good articulating arm clamps is my starting point for almost everything. I like to put the "main" piece directly under the shard that is being joined. You want the pieces as tight as you can get of course but you don't need a ton of pressure on there. The flour in the medium will draw it together some as it dries. If you get a good bond but it cures with gaps or holes in the join, you can fill in later with lacquer mixed with a fine clay. Tonoko or jinoko are the key words if you don't have it on hand.

Usually there's at least one join where you need to set multiple pieces at the same time. Sometimes I'll use a single string tied across the outermost shard to keep pressure on, usually across the rim of a bowl or cup. More than one string is too much to keep track of for me though. And the lacquer fumes are extremely detrimental to rubber and elastic, they will harden and break with a few hours of exposure so I don't use them at all.

A more traditional move is to bury the main body of the repair in a dish of sand, with the part to be joined exposed. Then arm clamps or whatever to hold the pieces together. Just make sure any joins that touch sand are fully cured. The cleaner you work the less sanding you'll have later. But there will always be some so do what's necessary to get it together then clean afterwards. I've even used masking tape to hold some many-pieced shatters together. It's a mess but it works, provided the piece doesn't have any texture or decorative elements that could be damaged by the sanding.

Good luck! It's the most tricky and frustrating part, and where most of the failures happen. You should probably expect some failures and setbacks, it's just part of it.

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