I've come across some repairs that may need a bit more reinforcement. Generally speaking, these repairs are fairly strong but for the everyday wear and tear, it doesn't hurt to help pieces along where they could use the extra help. I've not had to apply this type of reinforcement to a bonsai pot, but that's not to say I won't in the future.
This is a cup I'm repairing for a coworker who dropped one of his favorite cups when working in his workshop. It dropped on hard pavement and dropped in such a way that broke the ear and chipped a piece of the interior part of the cup. So having repaired it and put it back together. I've gotten it to a point where the cup is ready to receive additional reinforcement.
He told me he doesn't hold the ear because the shape of the cup lends itself so well to just holding it on the bottom. However, I figured it's always better to reinforce now that I'm having repairs come back where the handle is weak.
Note the missing bits where blowout happens and the infill has to come in to bridge those gaps.
If you look carefully, you'll notice the scratch marks. This cup isn't a really great candidate for kintsugi repair especially the way I polish my work. This cup will scratch just by merely touching it. I've realized this iisn't really a glaze, it's like hydro dipping this design onto the cup.
To add additionall support, I've whipped up some mugi-urushi (the kind where you adhere things together) so that I can apply string to create a brace of sorts.
I've tightly wound the string around the site and applied quite a substantial amount of pressure to hold everything together. The tacky-ness of the urushi with the strong creates a lot of resistance allowing me to pull the string quite taught.
I went back and applied more mugi-urushi to the first site and repeat the same approach to the other site. The bottom will be left alone. There's no way to attach any reinforcement to that. It doesn't matter anyway because the two other parts have more chances of tencil failure as the bottom has a compressive force vs the top. I went over the entire area with mugi-urushi and now it's currently curing in the muro.
This will eventually cure and be hard. I'll come back through with filling material to fill the missing areas and then come back and sand the areas until it's flat. Which I will then reapply a second layer of sabi-urushi as filling material to ensure a flat surface. This will likely take a week or so to cure in the muro at 85% humidity and 75 degree F temps.
More to come! Learning something new with each project!
. And that made my heart smile, thank you for the kind words!
