Imari Platter Repair pt1

well we're ready to start another repair job today this time it's an amari japanese porcelain um it's a big platter i think what they call a five color platter it's five or six colors and it's not a real complicated job but it's a big platter and it's been repaired before and i undid the repair it actually came apart and um it took me a while to get all the old bonding agents off of it and now i'm uh going to rebond it and see if we can do a better job part of the problem is that it's not a tight fitting um fit when when i put these pieces together if you can zoom in on this half here uh you can't you probably can't i know you can't see this in the video but i'm going to tell you anyway i can get it perfectly aligned here and here but then in here it's not and there's actually a space if i were to hold this up to the light you could see light through it right here and that applies to both halves of this we have the same thing going on and part of this is a part of the reason for this is uh in this case it's a previous repair there's a there's a chip on the back side that uh is out of alignment and just enough to where it's not allowing other pieces to fit but i can't get that apart so i'm gonna work around it and the other issue is on a lot of uh porcelains certain kinds of high-fired porcelains you have this odd thing that happens in firing ceramics when ceramics are fired they shrink different kinds of uh ceramics shrink at different uh proportions it can be as much as 15 which is a good deal basically one-sixth of a size in reduction in size and so what happens in that is if it was just a shrinkage that would be not too much of a problem but what happens is where you have different wall thicknesses along here and you have a compound curve it's curved this way and curved this way we often get a result in some kinds of porcelains it's really dramatic but in this case it's it's extremely slight but it's just enough to provide not a tight fit but what happens is the the thing warps and when it's fired you don't see that it's all under tension there's these internal stresses that happen in that shrinkage and then when it breaks that tension is released and it actually changes shape slightly and so it no longer fits on some types of bone china that can be extremely dramatic i've seen uh i've seen cases where it's off by like this much where it will spring change that much it's it's insane how bad that can be in this case it's extremely slight but it's just enough to i'm going to have to be careful of my alignment and there will be some filling involved along this crack that i would rather not have but i'm stuck with what i have to work with anyway um even with all that it's still a rather routine uh repair of this sort of object and we're going to get right to it normally i would tape this together dry with tape and get all my alignment worked out and then i would apply my adhesive to the outside of the crack and it would wick into it in this case since i have access and since i know there's going to be excess space in it i'm just going to apply the hixel to the thing before i tape it together you've seen me do that on on other objects usually i do that when the walls are so thick that i can't depend on the the pixel penetrating far enough and so i just want to make sure i have a good ample coating of it and it gets gets on all that different thicknesses and will get good coverage just airing on the side of caution to get a good result okay so we're going to use hickstall to bond this together this is good old good porcelain and this is the product i'm using i happen to get it from this pla this time i got it from this place they're a book binding supplier place i don't know how that asks how they even use this stuff but that's where i got it what i do is i just go online when i need it and i do a search on this or this and whatever comes up with a good price that's where i order it from so if you want to use it that's what you should do uh anyway um that's what i'm using so uh in this case uh i already had some hicks mixed up for a previous job and so it's not completely fresh it's a day old uh when it's fresh it's kind of like water and right now it's kind of like [Music] thin honey uh so it's going to spread okay but i need a brush to do it and i it won't wick into the crack at this thickness but i'm going to apply it to the edge and tape it instead of wicking into the crack so i'm going to put this half of it together first plenty of working time i don't have to worry about my glue setting up on me it takes a couple of days for this to set up if i don't put it in a hot box if i put it in the hotbox i can speed it up significantly and then how much depends on how thick i apply it and how thick the walls are so i'm gonna get the tape on here press it down keep it away from the edges just enough to hold it together okay so when we put this together we try not to grind the edges together it's very important that we get this end pieces lined up and now i'm going to stretch and stick press it down with my fingernail and now we go online the other side i use my thumbnail here to tell when i have the alignment correct and when i don't when my thumbnail doesn't get caught we're good okay now you can see there's a tiny bit of space right in here where you can't the edges didn't come together completely it's very very close but i'm not quite perfect okay now carefully turn it over and take the other side and every time i put the tape on i'm rechecking my alignment on this line you're seeing is the bead of glue squeeze out all right so i've added a little bit more tape because i'm going to be manipulating this large heavy object and i don't want this alignment changing while i'm doing that i mean it's something you will actually need to constantly adjust it at least until i get this tape up finished like right now i want to keep this immobilized as much as possible and also i want to wipe off any excess squeeze out because of it's very hard to keep track of where my hands are going and i don't want to get this on me and spread it around all right i've applied glue to my edge here and i'm gonna put the two halves together so it's hard to do through the middle stick it down good and tight and then i can pull it together as you can see there's a i've got a good alignment here good alignment here and a big step right here and that's all about that warping one of the reasons i'm putting so much tape on here is it's a heavy object and once i set this down to cure i don't want it to sag by stretching pulling on the tape and that's another reason i stretch the tape too okay and now i do the other side of that because right now this thing could swing open like a door it's only taped on one side so and here on the edge i've got perfect alignment that is i can't even feel that scrap that crack right there but let's see can you see this shadow here so you can see here by this shadow just how much of a step there is we have perfect alignment here i have it almost perfect here and there's a step going down here and it's going down on this so this one's up and this one's up it's just the way that the uh the thing warped when it shrank no i might be able to take a tiny bit of that step out here but not much but uh i mean this this is not unusual this this kind of thing and um you know we'll fix it when we get to the uh filling stage i have to even though these even the lines here where it's perfect we have to put a fill on that there's a hairline crack there and if i don't fill it it'll show in the finish normally this would go if it was a smaller object it would go into the hot box and that would speed the curing but this is so big and heavy that i don't want to take a chance on the tape getting warm and expanding and or stretching and then i wake up tomorrow and all my alignment is off and it's bonded in that i'll check this later today and i'll check it in the morning and again tomorrow afternoon and again the next day probably by tomorrow afternoon it will be on the beyond manipulating if it gets out of alignment but up until then we still have a little grace period to go if it if it does slump a little bit i can re-tape it if i have to but uh we'll back be back in uh two or three days and start the fills on this all right it is now uh three days later and i've just taken the tape off of the glue the glue up we did here with the hicks doll and how do i know it's strong enough to pick up and handle and work with and move on we haven't gone the full five to seven days to fully cure this but it is strong enough for me to handle this and work with it how do i know well like a bell if there's a crack in this that is not sound it won't ring and so we just do a tap test i'm holding it underneath in the center with my hand with my fingertips and if it rings like a bell it is sound it's a good job good glue job and so just like a bell won't ring correctly if there's a crack in it and i'm going to do my fills on this with this product it's called milliput and the version i'm using is super fine white comes in about five or six different colors but i use white terracotta and black in my in uh in my work um mostly i use the white and then once i mix it up it's a two-part epoxy and it's a putty and uh now it looks like that when it's ready to work and i'm applying my millipede with this little uh putty knife i made custom made for myself it's a little stiffer than a palette knife but they have different versions of varying degrees of flexibility so i'm spanning this crack one side of it is low and we're trying to ramp out that low spot and now i'm scraping it off the high side it on the other side and i'll file this down later i mean you've seen me do this on almost every job this step isn't all that big i just go wide on it so i have room to work it most of this will be gone when i file it down anyway i'm not gonna make you watch me do the whole thing i have two three cracks here and i'm gonna fill them like this on both sides come back and show you what that looks like once i get all it all filled and here's what the fill looks like before i file and here it is after the filing oh there's anyway [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so all right hmm you foreign you hmm so i've got a colored pencil here where i want to sketch in lightly the areas i need to paint and it's not so much to get the color in there is this to just give me some guidelines to work with yep it would be nice if i could use this as the color i could just because i could draw this a lot easier than i could paint it okay um you um uh you you you okay you

Channel: Martin Scherer

Views: 1,493

Rating: 4.9259257 out of 5

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Id: XInK6lyC_bM

Length: 46min 34sec (2794 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020